Wesleyan University The Honors College

“The Algerians’ Emergency Is Also Our Own” Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, and the Comité International

de Soutien aux Intellectuels Algériens

by

Savannah Kate Whiting

Class of 2013

A thesis submitted to the

faculty of Wesleyan University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

Degree of Bachelor of Arts

with Departmental Honors in Romance Languages and Literatures

Middletown, Connecticut April, 2013

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To those who have helped

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Acknowledgements

My research for this thesis, which coincided with the 50th anniversary of Algerian

independence, was made possible by a generous grant from the Tölölyan Fund for the

Study of Diasporas and Transnationalism, with the cooperation of the Bibliothèque

Nationale de France (Paris) and the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine

(Caen).

I owe much to Neil Doshi and Timothy Scott Johnson for their support and

companionship in Caen, to Edward Baring for graciously answering all of my questions,

and to my parents for their endless faith in me.

I also wish to thank my professors at Wesleyan, especially Jonathan Cutler, Greg

Goldberg, Typhaine Leservot, Andrew Curran, Joseph Fitzpatrick, Basak Kus, and

Khachig Tölölyan, for their confidence and continued guidance.

And of course, thanks to Ethan Kleinberg for advising this project, and for all of his

meaningful assistance.

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Table of Contents

Introduction The Death of a Colleague............................................................................ 6 Outline........................................................................................................ 12 1. Part One: Origins, 1930-1951

Jacques Derrida, Child of the Mediterranean.................................................. 16 L’Affaire Dreyfus........................................................................................................... 18

World War II.................................................................................................................. 20 Education........................................................................................................................ 22 Non-belonging............................................................................................................... 24

Pierre Bourdieu: From Paysan to Philosophe ................................................... 26

Part Two: Formations, 1951-1956 First Meeting: Khâgneux and Normaliens ....................................................... 29

Political Culture of the Ecole Normale Supérieure.................................................. 30 Intellectuals and the French Left................................................................................ 33

Intellectual Tropes......................................................................................................... 36 Intellectual Influences................................................................................................... 43

The Royal Route: Bourdieu’s Military Service and Ethnography................... 47 Social Sciences................................................................................................................ 47

Fieldwork........................................................................................................................ 50 Personal Transformation.............................................................................................. 54

Conclusion....................................................................................................... 55 2. French-Algerian War: 1954-1962

Introduction..................................................................................................... 60 The Intellectual Situation................................................................................ 62

The Algerian Other....................................................................................................... 64 Hegelian Foundations................................................................................................... 67 The Battle of Petitions.................................................................................................. 70

Pierre Bourdieu, Committed Observer?.......................................................... 73 Critique of Third Worldism......................................................................................... 76 Ethnographic Contributions........................................................................................ 78

The Revolutionary Question........................................................................................ 81 Aron’s “Realistic” Liberalism...................................................................................... 83

Derrida’s Silence.............................................................................................. 88 The French Algerian Liberal Position........................................................................ 92 The Case of Camus....................................................................................................... 96 The Hospitality of the Other..................................................................................... 100 Conclusion...................................................................................................... 105

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3. Black Decade: 1991-2002 Introduction.................................................................................................... 110

Algeria in Crisis............................................................................................................ 114 The CISIA’s Charter................................................................................................... 117

Hospitality and Political Asylum................................................................... 120 Campaign of Civil Resistance.................................................................................... 122 The Crisis of Political Asylum................................................................................... 123 France, terre d’asile?....................................................................................................... 127 Deconstructive Hospitality........................................................................................ 131

An International Appeal................................................................................. 136 Algeria’s Democratic Demands................................................................................. 137 Intellectuals at Stake.................................................................................................... 139 Secularism and Civil Society...................................................................................... 143 Democracy to Come................................................................................................... 147

The New Intellectual International............................................................... 149 French Institutional Settings...................................................................................... 150 Foucault’s “Specific” and Bourdieu’s “Collective” Intellectual........................... 151 Unified Social Science................................................................................................. 155 Conclusion Toward a New Internationalism.............................................................. 157 This Living “We”..................................................................................... 160 Bibliography Note on translations: For all citations of archival documents and secondary sources in French, my translation is given in the body of the text. See footnotes for the original French.

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INTRODUCTION

The Death of a Colleague

On January 30, 2002, Jacques Derrida began his seminar at the École des Hautes

Études en Sciences Sociales by speaking of his colleague Pierre Bourdieu, who had

passed away a week earlier. Recalling Bourdieu with sadness, but looking, he said, “for

strength on the side of life, or the reaffirmation of life,” Derrida shared a memory of his

friend from almost a decade before.1 In the same room where he presently stood,

Derrida explained, he, Bourdieu, and a small group of peers had founded the CISIA, the

Comité International de Soutien aux Intellectuels Algériens (International Committee for

the Support of Algerian Intellectuals), on June 17, 1993.2 The organization’s primary goal

was to combat the “assassination of intelligence” within that country by “breaking the

isolation” of Algeria and of Algerian intellectuals.3 At the heart of this endeavor was

what Derrida called “the memory and attachment” that he and Bourdieu “both had,

though differently, for Algeria, and the common concern for the terrible destiny of that

country.”4

In speaking of Algeria’s “terrible destiny,” Derrida undoubtedly alluded to the

country’s colonial history, which tied France and Algeria together through one hundred

sixty years of imperialism and an eight-year war of independence. Having embarked on a

“mission civilisatrice” (civilizing mission) there in 1830, France invested thoroughly in

                                                                                                               1 Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I (Chicago: 2 Comité International de Soutien aux Intellectuels Algériens (hereafter CISIA), “Charte du Comité International de Soutien aux Intellectuels Algériens,” [Paris, July 1, 1993], Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine, Caen (hereafter IMEC), DRR194. 3 Ibid. 4 Derrida and Bennington, The Beast and the Sovereign, 136.  

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Algeria as an integral part of its colonial “imaginaire.”5 The conviction, expressed in 1954

by then-Minister of the Interior François Mitterand, that Algeria was indissociable from

France itself, 6 made the struggle for Algerian independence one of the twentieth

century’s bloodiest wars of independence and “perhaps Africa’s most brutal and

destructive war of liberation.”7 From 1954 to 1962, French colonial authorities and the

nationalist forces of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) engaged in a bitter conflict

with over one million Muslim Algerian casualties, and which ended with the expulsion of

as many European settlers from their homes.8 Both sides practiced all manner of

brutality in the struggle, with the French military relying heavily on torture in order to

protect French sovereignty, and the FLN—with Frantz Fanon among its most

prominent spokesmen—both practicing and idealizing revolutionary violence. 9 As

Martin Stone describes, “The FLN used terrorist tactics to intimidate much of the

population and ensure its domination of the nationalist movement, while radical pro-

colonial groups such as the OAS [Secret Armed Organization] staged a series of cold-

blooded terrorist atrocities in the early 1960s.”10

                                                                                                               5 James D. Le Sueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization of Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 20. 6 Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 113; Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 28. Addressing the National Assembly on November 12, 1954, Mitterrand asserted: “Algeria is France. From Flanders to the Congo, there is one law, one single nation, one sole Parliament” (quoted in Evans, Algeria, 113). On November 8, 1954, the New York Times printed the following pronouncement by Mitterrand: “Algeria is France. And France will recognize no authority in Algeria other than her own” (quoted in Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 32). 7 Alex Thomson, An Introduction to African Politics (New York: Routledge, 2000), 233, citing John Grace and John Laffin, Dictionary of Africa since 1960: Events, Movements, Personalities (London: Fontana, 1991), 13; Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 1. 8 Alastair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (New York: The Viking Press, 1977), 14; Thomson, Introduction to African Politics, 233. 9 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 10; ibid., 168. 10 Martin Stone, The Agony of Algeria (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 177.

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More recently, however, Derrida referred to Algeria’s troubled postcolonial

history, and specifically to the violence that had erupted there following the country’s

first attempt at democratic elections in 1991.11 The period that began in 1991 and lasted

until 2002, the darkest time in Algeria’s postcolonial history, is commonly referred to as

the “décennie noire” (Black Decade). 12 By 1993, just three decades after gaining

independence from France, Algeria had fallen into a “civil war” that endured for almost

ten years, and during which as many as 150,000 Algerians died at the hands of Islamists

and security forces.13 Among those killed were large numbers of Algerian police, high

officials, civil servants, and intellectuals,14 whom the militarized factions of the Front

Islamique du Salut (FIS)—often acting independently of the party—targeted with a

                                                                                                               11 See Luis Martinez, The Algerian Civil War, 1990-1998 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 20. 12 Mariève Maréchal, (Re)-faire l’histoire : agentivité et démocratisation du passé dans Cette fille-là et Surtout ne te retourne pas de Maïssa Bey (master’s thesis, University of Quebec at Montreal, 2011), n.p., http://www.archipel.uqam.ca/5146/1/M12596.pdf. The term “décennie noire,” or Black Decade, is used in French and Algerian news publications to refer generally to the events of the 1990s in Algeria. Wesleyan University’s Typhaine Leservot has verified the dates 1991-2002, used here. They are also those given by Mariève Maréchal in her master’s thesis (ibid.). 13 John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 257; Typhaine Leservot, correspondence with the author (April 2013). The Black Decade was “more akin to the period of the ‘Terreur’ that engulfed France in 1793 during the French Revolution, than to a civil war whose archetypes are found in the US and Spanish civil wars” (Typhaine Leservot, correspondence with the author). For this reason, Ruedy prefers the term “insurgency” to “civil war,” arguing that the former term better characterizes the disproportionate relationship between the large death toll, and the small number of Islamist combatants; however, his argument does not fully escape the vocabulary of war. He writes, for example: “Only a small minority of Algerians supported the Islamists’ resort to war and the number of their combatants peaked at no more than 25,000” (Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 257). With this semantic ambiguity in mind, I cautiously adopt the term “civil war,” which predominates in historical accounts of the period, as well as in Bourdieu and Derrida’s contemporary statements. 14 Azzedine Layachi, “Algeria: Reinstating the State or Instating a Civil Society?” in Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority, ed. I. William Zartman (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1995), 179.

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series of terrorist attacks in their attempt to destabilize the “secularist-nationalist” state

and its supporters.15

Bourdieu and Derrida interpreted the Black Decade as a direct consequence of

Algeria’s colonial and postcolonial past.16 The war of liberation had left a legacy of

instability and repression in independent Algeria, and according to Martin Stone, “the

Islamic extremists of the 1990s used strategies and tactics identical to those of the

wartime mujahidine [freedom fighters]” who had defeated the French.17 Thus, as Derrida

spoke in 2002, Algeria was emerging from over a decade of violence whose trajectory

followed, in many ways, from the events of decolonization thirty years before. However,

unlike the radical liberation politics of the FLN, which drew from the anticolonial

theories of Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, the ideological force that drove the anti-

intellectual terrorism of this period, and which nearly led to the collapse of Algerian civil

society, was a new breed of Islamic “intégrisme” (fundamentalism) that constructed the

                                                                                                               15 Layachi, “Algeria,” 179; Stone, Agony of Algeria, 193. The FIS’s main armed wing, the Mouvement Islamique Armé (MIA) became the Armée Islamique du Salut (AIS) in early 1994 (Stone, Agony of Algeria, 186). As many as twelve armed Islamic groups threatened Algerian intellectuals in the early 1990s (Layachi, “Algeria,” 184), but the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA) was the only other major Islamic terrorist group and at this time, and thus served as “the complement of the MIA and the AIS” (Stone, Agony of Algeria, 178; ibid., 184). 16 Michael Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu: Agent Provocateur (New York, London: Continuum, 2004), 53; see also Jacques Derrida, correspondence with Arezki Metref [undated, ca. 1996], IMEC, DRR194 for an interview published in Le Matin on March 26, 1996. 17 Stone, Agony of Algeria, 177. Stone’s description of the Islamic groups of the 1990s as echoing the traditions of the FLN mujahidine applies mainly to the AIS, which was “more akin to a traditional guerrilla group” than the GIA (ibid.). He writes, “Most of [the GIA’s] members had never been part of the FIS and most of them rejected the front’s strategy of considering negotiation with the Algerian state to achieve power. The organization totally rejected any dialogue or compromise with the state and, unlike the MIA and AIS, favored short-term, spectacular terrorist attacks” (ibid., 184).

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secular, Francophone “laïco-assimilationistes” (laic assimilationists) as the enemies of a

potential Islamic state.18

Bourdieu and Derrida’s actions, as guiding members of CISIA, arose from a faith in

Algerian civil society and in the role of intellectuals in promoting pluralism and

expression therein. Challenging the totalitarian and regressive vision of the Islamic

fundamentalists, they argued:

Algerian culture is, in fact, diverse, multilingual, and cosmopolitan.

Algerian society, rich in associative and professional initiatives, aspires to

liberty of expression and thought. It is also shot through contradictory

identifications and allegiances, which must arrive at their point of

equilibrium. Islam, in its many functions and interpretations, as well as

moral secularization, are at stake in these tensions.19

For Bourdieu, Derrida, and the international assembly of intellectuals who comprised the

CISIA, this diversity and intellectual vitality was the source of Algeria’s potential as the

“embryo of a future democracy.”20 They viewed “intellectuals, and generally all those

who produce ideas, analyses, artworks and social services” as “the indispensible

                                                                                                               18 Martinez, Algerian Civil War, 193. The former Algerian Prime Minister Belaïd Abdessalam used the term “laïco-assimilationiste” to describe the supporters of a secular-nationalist Algerian state (Stone, Agony of Algeria, 193). It is important to recognize that the Islamist movement in Algeria was not produced from a political vacuum. The 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran was an important precursor to, and influence on, the events of the late 1980s. Algerian Islamists took inspiration from the Iranian Islamist movement, which “provided an early impetus” for Islamic resistance to the FLN, because it “represented […] a successful challenge to secularism that could be duplicated” (Layachi, “Algeria,” 183). 19 CISIA, “Appel pour la paix civile en Algérie,” [press release, 1993], IMEC, DRR 194. “La culture algérienne est de fait diverse, plurilingue, ouverte sur le monde. La société, riche d’initiatives et associatives et professionnelles, aspire à la liberté d’expression et de pensée. Elle est traversée d’identifications et d’appartenances contradictoires qui doivent trouver leur point d’équilibre. L’islam, dans la multiplicité de ses fonctions et de ses interprétations, aussi bien que la sécularisation des mœurs, sont les enjeux de ces tensions” (ibid.).

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mediators of political expression.”21 The CISIA therefore declared, in no uncertain terms,

its intention to “rise up relentlessly against [these intellectuals’] physical elimination and

the threats to which they are subjected, and use all the means disposable to us to protect

their rights of residence, to help them to live and to fulfill their roles.”22 In doing so,

Derrida, Bourdieu, and the other members of the CISIA identified with Algerian

intellectuals, and acknowledged their sense of co-responsibility for the future of Algerian

democracy. “The Algerians’ emergency, they said, “is also our own.”23

As prominent intellectuals, each in his own right, Derrida and Bourdieu

possessed significant public influence and an intimate sense of the urgency of the

Algerian situation in the 1990s, which they characterized not only as a particular case of

“intellecticide,” but as an international crisis of democracy.24 Their project with the

CISIA was, above all, intended to assist and protect those Algerians who defended the

ideals of free thought and free speech, and who actively engaged in the creation and

critique of ideas.25 Yet, as Derrida intimated following Bourdieu’s death, he and Bourdieu

each arrived at this commitment to the Algerian crisis from a different theoretical and

biographical background. By first investigating the relationships of both figures to

Algeria in order to gain perspective on the particular and universal issues at stake for

Derrida and Bourdieu in the Black Decade, we will then be able to approach the

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           20 Ibid. “[E]mbryon d’une future démocratie.” 21 Ibid. “Les intellectuels et généralement tous les producteurs d’idées, d’analyses, d’œuvres d’art et de services sociaux, en sont des médiateurs indispensables.” 22 Ibid. “C’est de cette société diversifiée que, dans les dernières années, est issu le renouveau de l’expression politique en Algérie, embryon d’une future démocratie.” “Nous devons nous élever sans relâche contre leur élimination physique et les menaces dont ils font l’objet, et par tous les moyens dont nous disposons défendre leur droit de cité, les aider à vivre et à remplir leur tâche” (ibid.). 23 Ibid. “L’urgence des Algériens est aussi la nôtre” (ibid.). 24 See Derrida, correspondence with Metref.

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question of their political and intellectual positions toward Algeria in light of their shared

personal investment in that country’s terrible fate.

Outline

My thesis takes Derrida and Bourdieu’s joint response to the tragedy of the Black

Decade as the point of departure for investigating these figures’ respective relationships

to Algeria. Drawing principally from intellectual histories and intellectual biographies, I

begin by examining Derrida and Bourdieu’s intellectual and political formations in

France and in Algeria, so as to consider how these may have contributed to their later

theoretical formulations and modes of political commitment. I aim to illustrate both the

transnational character of these formations, and how each was shaped by the intellectual

and political culture of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in the 1950s, against a backdrop of

France’s retreat from empire and the rise of communism as a global political ideology.

In a second chapter, I situate Derrida and Bourdieu’s analyses of the French-

Algerian War within the larger debate over French intellectuals’ role in Algerian

decolonization and their responsibility to Algeria’s future. I examine each figure’s

relationship to political action in an attempt to identify new paradigms that coincide with

their emergence as public intellectuals. This section provides the necessary background

for the ensuing discussion of Derrida and Bourdieu’s response to the events of the Black

Decade.

Finally, drawing on archival documents obtained from the Institut Mémoires de

l’Edition Contemporaine, I analyze Derrida and Bourdieu’s mutual intervention in the

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           25 See CISIA, “Appel pour la paix civile en Algérie.”

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Algerian insurgency, as co-founders of the Comité International de Soutien aux

Intellectuels Algériens (International Committee for the Support of Algerian

Intellectuals). The CISIA, which formed in response to a wave of anti-intellectual

terrorism by Islamic fundamentalists in Algeria, aimed to assist Algerian intellectuals in

obtaining the right of asylum in France—a task whose urgency was amplified as the

French government enacted measures to counter the influx of North African refugees.

The historical moment of the Black Decade provides an occasion to explore

Derrida’s and Bourdieu’s later theoretical formulations. In Derrida’s writings on

cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, and in Bourdieu’s critique of scholastic enclosure and

the economic structures of colonialism and globalization, I locate the theoretical tools

with which to interpret their actions as members of the CISIA. For both Derrida and

Bourdieu, I argue, France’s historic relationship to Algeria, and the particular importance

of this relationship to France’s intellectual history, necessitates a rethinking of national

and institutional boundaries, which their project with the CISIA attempts to enact in its

movement toward new forms of internationalism. This ultimately raises the question of

how the CISIA's project may have contributed to the formation of a new conception of

intellectual legitimacy—one better suited to the political demands with which

intellectuals the world over were confronted at the turn of the 21st century.

I structure my argument so as to illustrate the inverse trajectories that Bourdieu

and Derrida followed with respect to Algeria. In doing so, I attempt to provide a

balanced account of each figure’s relationship to the place and the political question of

Algeria. For Bourdieu, this was an early subject of social-scientific investigation and the

milieu in which he first worked through the techniques of his field theory of research.

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However, what began as a major focus of his research gradually receded from view over

the course of his career, becoming one of many commitments on a vast political horizon

that attempted to shoulder “the weight of the world.”

For Derrida, Algeria was, and remained, a touchstone for the questions of

politics, culture, and identity. Derrida’s personal ambivalence about these questions,

which the trials of French-Algerian relations throughout the twentieth century

exacerbated, kept him from speaking publicly about Algeria until late in life.

Nevertheless, “the Algerian ordeal” had an enormous influence on Derrida’s “political

culture:”

Without being an expert in this regard—far from it—all that I have

learned about politics in general has touched my life, in some manner,

through Algeria’s history over the past 50 years and what I have been

able to learn about that history. My “political culture,” if I might call it

that, has formed through the experience of the Algerian ordeal.26

By nature of this relationship, Derrida’s theoretical formulations from the 1980s and

1990s—the period in which he began to engage with explicitly political questions— are a

particularly rich resource for the analysis of the CISIA’s work. I strive to interpret the

CISIA’s project in terms of both Derrida and Bourdieu’s theoretical leadership, while

also illustrating how Derrida—through his aspirations, identifications, and actions—

figures (and is left, upon Bourdieu’s passing), as a living symbol of this project.

                                                                                                               26 Derrida, correspondence with Metref. “D’ailleurs, sans être un expert à cet égard, loin de là, tout ce que j’ai pu apprendre de la politique en général est aussi passé dans ma vie, de quelque manière, par l’histoire de l’Algérie depuis 50 ans et par ce que je peux savoir de son passé. Ma ‘culture politique,’ se je puis dire, s’est formée au travers de l’expérience ou de l’épreuve algérienne” (ibid.).

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CHAPTER ONE

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Part One: Origins, 1930-1951

Jacques Derrida, Child of the Mediterranean

Jacques Derrida was born in 1930 in the working-class city of El-Biar, a suburb

of the Algerian capital of Algiers.27 At age 19, he left Algeria for Paris, where he would

study at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and, eventually, at one of France’s most prestigious

institutes of higher learning—the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), on Paris’s rue

d’Ulm. 28 As a descendant of Sephardic Jews who inhabited Algeria long before

colonization by the French in 1830, Derrida lived an uneasy existence in the deeply

inegalitarian and anti-Semitic Algeria of his youth.29 “The Jewish community in Algeria,”

Derrida explained in a late interview, “was there long before the colonization by the

French. So on one hand, Algerian Jews belonged to the colonized people, and on the

other they assimilated with the French colonizers.”30 This simultaneous “belonging” to

the colonized population and “assimilation” with the colonizers did not, however,

guarantee acceptance within either social group.

Belittled, as Edward Baring writes, “by a group [the Français d’Algérie] who were

themselves at the edge of French society and suffered under the condescending gaze of

their metropolitan concitoyens,” Derrida and many other Algerian Jews suffered a double

                                                                                                               27 Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 325. 28 Derrida and Bennington, Jacques Derrida, 328-329. 29 Benoît Peeters, Derrida (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), 22; Benjamin Stora, Algeria, 1830-2000: A Short History, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 9. 30 Jacques Derrida, interview with Michel Rosenfeld for Cordozo Life following a conference on “hospitality,” Fall 1998, IMEC, DRR 194. See also http://www.cardozo.yu.edu/life/fall1998/derrida/index.shtml.

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marginalization. 31 Throughout the colonial period, Sephardic Jews, in particular,

occupied a tense and insecure position within Algerian society; as “liminal figures” in

colonial North Africa, they “[sat] uncomfortably between the colonizers and the

colonized.”32

Marginalized by the French settlers, Algerian Jews nonetheless enjoyed a

privileged social position compared to the Muslim majority.33 The Crémieux Decree of

1870 codified this privilege by naturalizing the 37,000 Jews living in Algeria as French

citizens.34 The conditions of the decree implied that Algerian Jews would assimilate to

the French way of life by shedding the manners, language, dress, and names (such as

“Daniel, Derrida, Nouischi, and Stora”) associated with Judaism.35 The Derrida family

was no exception to this assimilation, and Jacques Derrida himself spoke of his family’s

embourgoisement (gentrification) following the decree of 1870.36 Half a century after the

creation of the Crémieux Decree, the Derridas’ Jewish culture had been tainted, in

Jacques Derrida’s eyes, by an “insidious Christian contamination.”37 He wrote of this

“contamination” in The Monolingualism of the Other, in which he describes how his family

adopted Christian terms to denote Jewish rituals, using “baptism” to stand for

                                                                                                               31 Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945-1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 17; Stora, Algeria, 9. Although Derrida’s ancestors’ history in North Africa is not well documented, the longest-settled Algerian Jews could trace their migrations to Algerian land back many millennia to the time of trade between Phoenicians and Hebrews; a second wave fled Palestine, blending into the Berber tribes; and a third came from Spain, fleeing the Inquisition in the sixteenth century. This third wave brought with them “their culture, their expertise, and the rabbinical elite, who would standardize customs and laws of marriage” (Stora, Algeria, 9). 32 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 16. 33 Stora, Algeria, 9. 34 Evans, Algeria, 21. 35 Ibid. 36 Jacques Derrida, Apprendre à vivre enfin: Entretien avec Jean Birnbaum (Paris: Galilée, 2005), 36-37, cited in Peeters, Derrida, 22.

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circumcision, and renaming bar mitzvah “communion.” 38 The linguistic appropriation

that Derrida observed as a Jewish child growing up outwardly Christian seems to have

informed—or at least serves to illustrate—the theory of symbolic domination he

elaborates in Monolingualism. In any case, Derrida’s repressed Jewish heritage corroborates

our understanding of the “liminal status” of the Juifs d’Algérie, who by necessity

conformed to the symbolic systems of the European, and mainly Roman Catholic,

colonizers, but who, given the hierarchical structures imposed on colonial society, could

not overcome the secondary status that their religious and ethnic differences conferred.39

L’Affaire Drey fus

Two landmark moments inform our understanding of the historical trajectory of

Algerian anti-Semitism. The first, the notorious Dreyfus Affair, occurred long before

Derrida’s birth, but coincided with an event that set off French intellectuals’ initiation

into politics, and that would color Derrida’s early experience of the Parisian academic

milieu. The prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army who in

1894 was falsely accused of spying for the Germans during the Franco-Prussian War,

polarized French society and spurred many French intellectuals to take a stand in

Dreyfus’s defense.40 Most importantly, the Affair signaled the construction of the French

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           37 Jacques Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 89-90. 38 Derrida, Monolinguisme de l’autre, 89-90. “J’avais affaire, pensais-je alors, à un judaïsme des ‘signes extérieurs.’ Mais je ne pouvais me révolter, et crois-moi, je me révoltais contre ce que je tenais pour des gesticulations, en particulier les jours de fête dans les synagogues, je ne pouvais m’emporter que depuis ce qui était déjà une insidieuse contamination chrétienne…” (ibid.). 39 Evans, Algeria, 30. 40 Ibid., 375n25; Piers Paul Read, The Dreyfus Affair: The Story of the Most Infamous Miscarriage of Justice in French History (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), 232-238.

  19

intellectual sphere as a realm of political action and debate.41 Although the Dreyfus

Affair occurred within the Metropolis, its effects were also felt in the Algerian colony,

where anti-Semitism had been escalating throughout the 1870s and 1880s, since the

creation of the Crémieux Decree.42

Most scholars agree that Algerian anti-Semitism, which we will define broadly as

the malignment and marginalization of Jews in Algeria, was a political phenomenon born

of the Crémieux Decree;43 however, the stratified nature of colonial Algerian society

meant that two distinct social positions motivated this anti-Semitic sentiment. For the

European settlers, as Martin Evans explains, “anti-Semitism tapped into […] perceptions

of themselves as ordinary, hard-working people. Jews were held up as a rich and

exploitative breed intent on dominating French Algeria.”44 In contrast, the Muslim

majority resented the enfranchisement of the Jewish population “because it reinforced

their lack of rights.”45 The Dreyfus Affair thus provided ample fuel for the explosion of

anti-Semitism that overtook Algeria in 1897. 46 In addition to mobilizing French

intellectuals to voice their belief in Dreyfus’s innocence, the publication of Emile Zola’s

“J’accuse!” on January 13, 1898 provoked Algerian settlers’ furor over the

pronouncement that the army had fabricated the case against Dreyfus as part of an anti-

Semitic conspiracy.47

                                                                                                               41 See Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli, Les intellectuels en France, de l’affaire Dreyfus à nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 1992), 5-12. 42 Evans, Algeria, 30. 43 David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 202. 44 Evans, Algeria, 30. 45 Ibid., 22. 46 Ibid., 30. 47 Ibid., 375; Ory and Sirinelli, Intellectuels en France, 5.

  20

Zola’s letter sparked riots throughout the Republic, but the most violent ones

occurred in Algeria, beginning in the Jewish quartiers of Mostaganem and Oran.48 On

January 18 and 19, 1898, Evans explains, “settler students burnt effigies of Alfred

Dreyfus and Emile Zola while shouting ‘Long live the army! Down with Jews!’”49 The

police-sanctioned looting of Jewish shops in Algiers lasted for five days after “J’accuse!”

appeared in the daily journal L’Aurore,50 during which time two Jews were killed, and by

some reports hundreds of people were injured.51 The violence solidified anti-Semitism as

a powerful and lasting feature of colonial politics—one that responded directly to the

fluctuations of anti-Semitic sentiment within the hexagon, but often with even greater

violence and fervor.52

World War II

Paris’s invasion by German forces during World War II sent shock waves

throughout Algeria. By most accounts, including Derrida’s own, anti-Semitism was more

severe in Algeria during the occupation than in any region of metropolitan France. Local

authorities, eager to appease the newly instated Vichy regime, enacted measures to

radically destabilize the position of Jews in Algerian society,53 and although the Vichy

regime never installed itself on Algerian soil, the local authorities “applied anti-Semitic

measures with more rapidity and zeal than in continental France” in order to satisfy the

                                                                                                               48 Read, Dreyfus Affair, 221; Evans, Algeria, 30. 49 Evans, Algeria, 30. 50 Ibid.; Prochaska, Making Algeria French, 202; Ory and Sirinelli, Intellectuels en France, 5. 51 Prochaska, Making Algeria French, 202; Evans, Algeria, 30. 52 Evans, Algeria, 30. See also Prochaska, Making Algeria French, 202-203. Two important changes in Algerian politics occurred as a result of the anti-Semitic movement in the late 1890s: first, the election of four anti-Semitic deputies (most notably Edouard Drumont) in the national elections of May 1898; and second, a marked increase in anti-Semitic publications, including such titles as Le Combat Antijuif, Le Colon Antijuif-Algérien, and Le Petit Anti-Juif (Evans, Algeria, 30).

  21

anti-Jewish movements that had taken hold in the colony.54 “During the Nazi occupation

there were no German soldiers in Algeria,” Derrida explained. “There was only the

French and the Vichy Regime, which produced and enforced laws that were terribly

repressive.”55

On October 3, 1940, the Vichy government introduced a Jewish Statute that

expelled Jews from the legal and teaching professions.56 Just four days later, Marcel

Peyrouton, the former Algerian secretary general and Vichy’s minister of the interior,

annulled the Crémieux Decree and thereby revoked the French citizenship of Jews in

Algeria, leaving them “stateless.”57 As Derrida later remarked, many Algerian Jews

responded to the annulment of their status as Frenchmen with renewed allegiance to

French culture and what he called the “paradoxical effect” of a greater “desire for

integration in the non-Jewish community.”58

In Derrida’s own words, the events of the early 1940s “remained enigmatic [for

the Jewish community in Algeria], perhaps not accepted, but endured like a natural

disaster for which there is no explanation.”59 This was certainly the case for Derrida

when, in October 1942, he was forced out of the high school he attended by a new

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           53 Derrida and Bennington, Jacques Derrida, 325. 54 Peeters, Derrida, 28-31. “En absence de toute occupation allemande, les dirigeants locaux font preuve d’un grand zèle: pour satisfaire les mouvements juifs, les mesures antisémites sont appliquées de manière plus rapide et plus radicale qu’en métropole” (ibid.). 55 Derrida, interview for Cardozo Life. 56 Derrida and Bennington, Jacques Derrida, 325-326. 57 Stora, Algeria, 20; Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 17. 58 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 17; Jacques Derrida, Points…: Interviews, 1974-1994 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 121. 59 Derrida quoted in Peeters, Derrida, 31. “Pour cette communauté juive, les choses restaient énigmatiques, peut-être pas acceptées, mais subies comme une catastrophe naturelle pour laquelle il n’y a pas d’explication” (ibid.).

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measure that limited the number of Jews admitted into Algerian classrooms from 14 to

7%.60 This sudden exclusion—the work of local authorities rather than the Vichy

regime—would leave a profound impression on the young Derrida.61

Educat ion

As Edward Baring points out, Derrida’s education in Algeria illustrates how the

myth of “French Algeria” manifested concretely in the institutional structures of the late

colonial period.62 France’s colonial mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission) entailed the

creation of an educational system in Algeria that paralleled that of the Metropolis.63

Education was an important ideological tool for maintaining the myth of French Algeria,

and thus received considerable emphasis from colonial authorities.64 Under colonial rule,

Algeria was a French educational district built on the same model as those in

metropolitan France.65 Schools provided a means for introducing and institutionalizing

principles of secularism and French nationalism within the colonial territory. Thus, as

Paul Silverstein explains: “The academic year followed the same rhythms and breaks as

schools in Paris, without regard to the agrarian cycles or Islamic festivities. Secular

textbooks imported from Paris declared that the students’ history began with ‘our

ancestors, the Gauls.’”66

                                                                                                               60 Derrida and Bennington, Jacques Derrida, 326. The school’s rector was responsible for this reduction of the Numerous Clausus cutoff; in effect, the reduction meant that in a class of 41 pupils (7% = 2.87), only two Jewish students were allowed to remain (ibid.). 61 Ibid. 62 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 18. 63 Paul A. Silverstein, Algeria in France (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 44. 64 Ibid. 65 Stora, Algeria, 24. 66 Silverstein, Algeria in France, 44-45.

  23

Thus, even before his move to France in 1949, Derrida was already “installed

within the French system,” his early education in Algeria having closely resembled that

of students in mainland France. 67 Derrida’s teachers, such as Jan Czarnecki, were

educated in Paris and carried the influence of Parisian thought to the colony. 68

Accordingly, archives from the period show that the young Derrida’s “essays treat

French themes, deal with up-to-the-minute French topics, and show a familiarity with,

especially philosophical, texts from the Metropole.”69

When the 1942 decision excluded the 12-year-old Derrida from the “aryanized”

Lycée Ben Aknoun, he responded to this injustice, he said, with “the despair of the

innocent child who is by accident charged with a guilt he knows nothing about.”70 Upon

his expulsion from Ben Aknoun, Derrida refused to attend a Jewish school, the Lycée

Emile-Maupas, which took its name from the street behind Algiers Cathedral where

Jewish teachers who had lost their public teaching positions had set up an improvised

school.71 Derrida found the atmosphere at Emile-Maupas to be unbearable, and during

the year he was enrolled there he rarely attended classes, but kept his absence a secret

from his parents.72 In 1943, and as a direct result of the arrival of American and British

forces in Algeria on November 8, 1942, Derrida was finally allowed to return to the

                                                                                                               67 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 18. 68 Ibid.; see also Silverstein, Algeria in France, 51. Education “was viewed as the most important instrument or ‘armament’ in this process of colonial qua national integration” (Silverstein, Algeria in France, 44). France’s civilizing mission “went hand in hand with an ‘educating mission’ and a ‘Christianizing mission’” (Silverstein, Algeria in France, 51). Behind this mission was the belief that “the instruction of Muslim children in French language ideas” was necessary to combat the presumed ignorance and backwardness of Arab peoples (Silverstein, Algeria in France, 51). 69 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 18. 70 Derrida and Bennington, Jacques Derrida, 305-306. 71 Ibid., 326. 72 Ibid.

  24

Lycée Ben Aknoun; however, the school proper was used as a makeshift hospital and

camp for Italian forces throughout 1944 and 1945, and classes were conducted in huts

elsewhere on the school grounds.73

The Vichy regime’s anti-Semitic measures were fully reversed within eleven

months after the Allied forces arrived in Algeria, and the Crémieux Decree was officially

reinstated on October 26, 1943.74 The restitution of the decree and the reversal of the

Jewish Statute allowed Derrida to regain the formal privileges of his restored French

citizenship, and eventually to attend the hypokhâgne at North Africa’s most prestigious

school, the Lycée Bugeaud d’Alger.75 When Derrida applied to pursue the khâgne in Paris,

in hopes of one day writing literature,76 the process of applying to the Lycée Louis-le-

Grand was no more complicated for him than it would have been for any other French

student, European or Algerian.77

Non-be longing

The painful experiences of anti-Semitism and exclusion that Derrida endured

during his youth in Algeria impressed on him the transience of belonging and the

insufficiency of nationalist identification. These formative experiences underscore the

ambivalence of Derrida’s relationship to France and to French Algeria, which, Baring

reminds us, “may have been a colonial fiction,” but was “a fiction with considerable

                                                                                                               73 Ibid., 327; Evans, Algeria, 76. 74 Stora, Algeria, 20. 75 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 18; ibid., 56. The Lycée Bugeaud took its name from the General who had led the French conquest of Algeria over a century before (ibid., 18). 76 Derrida and Bennington, Jacques Derrida, 327. 77 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 18. See also Derrida, Points…

  25

power and left its imprint upon Derrida as it did upon many others.”78 Although he

continued to identify strongly with Algeria throughout his life, and although this

identification motivated his later actions on the country’s behalf, the historical and

sociological circumstances under which Derrida’s cultural and political allegiances

formed prevented him from considering himself to be completely or uniquely Algerian.

Furthermore, despite having been profoundly hurt by his expulsion from Ben Aknoun,

Derrida never sought recourse to an alternative of inclusion or integration; in fact, even

many years later, having experienced the injustice of anti-Semitism prevented him from

ever taking pleasure in communitarian experience or “gregarious identification, even if it

is Jewish.”79

This resistance to “gregarious identification” prevented Derrida from ever

“belonging” either to France or to Algeria; instead, he described an uneasy “feeling of

non-belonging,” or non-exclusive belonging, which formed the basis of his particular

and incorruptible transnationalism. 80 In a late interview with the Algerian scholar

Mustapha Chérif, Derrida articulated the influence of this liminality, this being-in-

between, by saying that he grew up—and perhaps remained—“a sort of child in the

margins of Europe, a child of the Mediterranean, who was not simply French nor simply

                                                                                                               78 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 18. 79 Derrida and Bennington, Jacques Derrida, 326-327; Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco, De quoi demain… (Paris: Fayard-Galilée, 2001), 183, quoted in Peeters, Derrida, 33. 80 Jacques Derrida, Points…: Interviews, 1974-1994 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 121.

  26

African, and who passed his time traveling between one culture and the other feeding

questions he asked himself out of that instability.”81

Pierre Bourdieu: From Paysan to Phi losophe

Pierre Bourdieu also followed an improbable trajectory to arrive at France’s most

prestigious academic institutions. As an established sociologist, he would use the terms

of his field theory to describe the “split habitus” that juxtaposed a privileged position in

academia with modest social origins.82 In The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu explains habitus as

embodying “the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product;” the

presence of the past, in turn, imbues the practices of the individual with their “relative

autonomy” vis à vis the “external dominations of the immediate present.”83 He writes,

“The habitus which, at every moment, structures new experience in accordance with the

structures produced by past experiences […] brings about a unique integration […] of

the experiences statistically common to members of the same class.”84 Conceived in

terms of his inherited class habitus, as we will see, Bourdieu’s academic career imposed a

definite rupture with the “social trajectory” delimited by his status.85

Born in 1930 to a family of sharecroppers who inhabited a rural enclave of

western France,86 Bourdieu succeeded (“miraculously,” he would say) as a scholarship

                                                                                                               81 Derrida quoted in Mustapha Chérif, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 31. 82 Deborah Reed-Danahay, Locating Bourdieu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 3. 83 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 56. 84 Ibid., 56.  85 Ibid., 60. 86 Loïc Wacquant, “The Sociological Life of Pierre Bourdieu,” International Sociology 17, no. 4 (2002): 550; Reed-Danahay, Locating Bourdieu, 31. Bourdieu’s father, who became a

  27

student in France’s test-based academic system.87 After studying as a boarder at the

public high school in Pau, near his hometown of Béarn, he went on to earn a state

scholarship, which allowed him to enter the khâgne at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand at the

recommendation of one of his teachers, a graduate of the École Normale.88 Bourdieu’s

extraordinary academic success gave him little choice but to study philosophy, which

reigned over France’s scholastic realm as “queen of all disciplines.”89 At the ENS,

philosophy attracted and selected students of the highest potential, guiding their

formation as an intellectual élite with a manifest sense of their superiority over the

students of other disciplines.90

As an iconoclast wary of the snobbish institutions and pretensions of academia,

Bourdieu would later describe his path to philosophy as “a manifestation of status-based

assurance which reinforced that status-based assurance (or arrogance).”91 In his Sketch for

a Self-Analysis, he describes the Khâgne of the mid-twentieth century as “the site where

French-style intellectual ambition in its most elevated, that is to say, philosophical, form

was exhibited.”92 The model to which young scholars strove was that of Jean-Paul Sartre,

who had established himself as the “total intellectual,” studied in “philosophy, literature,

history, ancient and modern languages,” and whose wide-reaching scholastic endeavors

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           postman, benefitted from a certain degree of class mobility in the shift from agriculture to civil service (Reed-Danahay, Locating Bourdieu, 31).  87 Reed-Danahay, Locating Bourdieu, 30. In Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (London: Sage Publications, 1977), Bourdieu and co-author Jean-Claude Passeron use the term “le miraculé,” or “wonderboy” to describe the petit-bourgeois or working-class child who succeeds in the academic system with none of the advantages conferred by class or social position upon the bourgeois child, whom they call “l’héritier” (“the heir”). 88 Wacquant, “Sociological Life of Pierre Bourdieu,” 550. 89 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 85; Pierre Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 5. 90 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 84-85. 91 Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-Analysis, 5.

  28

“encouraged a self-confidence often verging on the unself-consciousness of triumphant

ignorance.”93

Applying the terms of his field theory to the “intellectual fields” in which he

operated throughout his professional life, Bourdieu explains in his Sketch for a Self-

Analysis that, once admitted to the ranks of the intellectual élite, the philosopher had

secured for himself “the status-linked legitimacy” of his position within “a universally

recognized scholastic aristocracy.”94 Tautologically, Bourdieu believed, “one became a

‘philosopher’ because one had been consecrated and one consecrated oneself by securing

the prestigious identity of ‘philosopher.’”95 To do so required a high degree of self-

segregation within the philosophical community. In highly technical terms characteristic

of his sociological analyses, he describes philosophers as constituting a “strongly

integrated group,” which exercises its force through its members’ collusion in “the illusio,

a deep-rooted complicity in the collective fantasy, which provides each of its members

with the experience of an exaltation of the ego, the principle of a solidarity rooted in

attachment to the group as an enchanted image of the self.”96 The mechanism that

produces the philosophers’ “socially-constructed feeling of being of a ‘superior essence’”

is the same force that operates to produce solidarity among other groups with shared

interests and affinities, despite the philosophers’ pretensions to a superior or exceptional

status.97

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           92 Ibid., 5. 93 Ibid., 6. 94 Ibid., 6-7. 95 Ibid., 5.

  29

Part Two: Formations, 1951-1956

First Meeting: Khâgneux and Normal iens

It was at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand that Derrida and Bourdieu met as khâgneux

during the 1951-1952 school year.98 Located on rue Saint-Jacques, in close proximity to

the École Normale Supérieure, the “Baze Grand,” as it was known, occupied a central

position within the tight-knit academic world of midcentury Paris.99 Since 1905, the

Lycée Louis-le-Grand had gradually surpassed its closest competitor, the Lycée Henri IV,

in the competition for admissions to the rue d’Ulm,100 and by the time Derrida and

Bourdieu attended, it touted a significantly higher success rate than Henri IV, with twice

as many students succeeding for entrance to the ENS in a typical year.101

Admission to the ENS, like all of France’s Grandes Écoles, was determined

meritocratically by performance on a particular concours (entrance examination), but

students hoping to join the ranks of the French academic elite had to undertake special

preparations in order to qualify on the concours.102 The French government funded

several preparatory schools (Écoles Préparatoires) intended specifically to train

candidates, a process that lasted for at least two years.103 The test-based system allowed

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           96 Ibid., 7. 97 Ibid. 98 Derrida and Bennington, Jacques Derrida, 328-329. 99 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 55. 100 Jean-François Sirinelli, Génération intellectuelle: Khâgneux et Normaliens dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 72. 101 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 55-56. 102 See Jean-François Sirinelli, Génération intellectuelle, 41. 103 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 55. The two levels of preparation were known as hypokhâgne (first year) and khâgne (second year), and could be completed in as little as two years, although the competitive nature of the ENS concours meant that many students, like Derrida, repeated the second year of study (ibid.).  

  30

many students from outside of Paris to attend the Écoles as boarders (internes),104 and as

Jean-François Sirinelli has illustrated, the khâgnes recruited primarily from the middle

classes.105 In fact, the members of the old French aristocracy tended to be wary of the

ENS, an institution founded on the Revolutionary left-wing principles of equal

educational opportunity and social mobility.106 The ENS aimed, as Sirinelli describes, “to

encourage and to facilitate the promotion of young people from modest social

backgrounds” who would rightfully become the nation’s elite.107 Despite his critique of

the system’s classism, Bourdieu would become the exemplary figure for this

transformative potential, personifying the claim that “anyone […], if they were bright

enough, could get into the Ecole, and the son of a postmaster from the Pyrenees could

eventually become a professor at the Collège de France.”108 There were, of course, limits

to such an idealistic ideology, and the population of elected elites was necessarily small.

In the early 1950s, the ENS had only 200 students, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s

roughly thirty philosophy students were enrolled at a given time.109 The yearly intake of

philosophy students thus ranged from two, in 1953, to nine, in 1950.110

Pol i t i ca l Culture o f the École Normale Supér ieure

The atmosphere in which Derrida and Bourdieu were immersed at the ENS was,

as Baring describes it, one of “political dogmatism enforced through social pressure,” in

which “ideological politics seeped into all parts of everyday life.”111 Yet this was not

                                                                                                               104 Sirinelli, Génération intellectuelle, 206-208. 105 Ibid., 178. 106 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 86. 107 Sirinelli, Génération Intellectuelle, 200. 108 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 86. 109 Ibid., 84-85. 110 Ibid., 85. 111 Ibid., 82-83.

  31

always the case for Normaliens, who scarcely envisioned themselves as political actors

prior to the Dreyfus Affair.112 The ENS became “inextricably linked” to French political

life when two members of the faculty prominently took Dreyfus’s side.113 One of the

first Dreyfusards was Gabriel Monod, head of the ENS, who published an open letter in

Le Temps on November 6, 1897 expressing skepticism in response to Dreyfus’s

conviction and calling on officials to review the case.114 In addition, the librarian Lucien

Herr, himself an acquaintance of Alfred Dreyfus, became one of the Captain’s

staunchest advocates, fostering a community of active Dreyfusards from within the

school.115

The activism of the École’s distinguished members during the Dreyfus Affair led

an embarrassed French government to restructure the school, “reuniting” it with the

University of Paris in an attempt to disband the elite enclave of professors and

politicians installed there.116 Consequently, all ENS faculty were reassigned to positions

at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France, leaving a small group of agrégé-répétiteurs,

mostly recent graduates of the ENS themselves, as the school’s only “professors.”117

Louis Althusser, for instance, was hired as agrégé-répétiteur in 1948, the year of his agrégation,

                                                                                                               112 Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France 1927-1961 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 53. 113 Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 53; Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 89; Ory and Sirinelli, Intellectuels en France, 6.  114 Read, Dreyfus Affair, 234; Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 89. 115 Ory and Sirinelli, Intellectuels en France, 6; Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 89; Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 53. 116 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 89; Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 54. 117 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 89.

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and presided over the school as a forceful proponent of Marxism throughout Derrida

and Bourdieu’s time there.118

In Jennings’ analysis, a commitment to Marxism was “born out of the twin

experiences of the Popular Front and the Second World War,” and “operated at the level

of intellectual orthodoxy.”119 Under Althusser’s influence, the communist cellule of the

ENS envisioned itself, in Baring’s terms, as “the critical heart of the PCF” (Parti

Communiste Français) and of French intellectual life at large. “Althusser,” Baring writes,

“offered the ENS cellule as an appropriate site of critique, the intellectual elite of France

who should also be the intellectual elite of the Party.”120 For both Derrida and Bourdieu,

the prevalence and militancy of the cellule made for a difficult initiation into the

confluent worlds of scholarship and politics. As figures on the “noncommunist far

left,”121 they “felt the overbearing pressure of a dominant communism,” and thus

entertained close but critical relationships to the PCF. 122 Derrida recalled, “it was

extremely difficult for someone on the Left […] to be thought of only as a crypto-

communist or a fellow traveler. It was very difficult not to join the Party.”123

As members of “dissident left-wing groups,” Derrida and Bourdieu strove

toward an alternative politics on the French left.124 Derrida described the cellule as “truly

hegemonic”125 and “dominated in a very tyrannical manner” 126 by the Stalinist influence.

                                                                                                               118 See Jacques Derrida, “Politics and Friendship: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker, The Althusserian Legacy (New York: Verso, 1993). 119 Jennings, “Dilemmas of the Intellectual,” 72. 120 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 99. 121 Derrida and Bennington, Jacques Derrida, 329. 122 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 91. 123 Derrida, “Politics and Friendship,” 199. 124 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 108. 125 Derrida, “Politics and Friendship,” 199. 126 Ibid., 187.

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According to Bourdieu, he and Derrida, along with Lucien Bianco and Jean Pariente,

founded a Committee for the Defense of Freedom to combat the Stalinist influence that

pervaded among their peers at the ENS circa 1951.127 As Bourdieu told it, fellow student

and cellule secretary Le Roy Ladurie even went so far as to denounce the group as

“social traitors” at a meeting of the PCF.128 Derrida biographer Edward Baring doubts

the existence of the Committee for the Defense of Freedom, cautioning that Bourdieu

made his claim after Pierre Juquin misidentified him as a member of the cellule in Le

Monde, and that there is little evidence other than Bourdieu’s word.129 Yet the claim is in

any case instructive, because it allows us to gauge the critical distance from the PCF that

Bourdieu and Derrida both maintained, and which informed their intellectual and

political pursuits as allied figures on the margins of the French left.

Inte l l e c tuals and the French Lef t

The pressure of the Communist cellule, which weighed heavily on Derrida and

Bourdieu as students at the ENS in the early 1950s, reflects communism’s rise as a global

power with “a developed intellectual rationale.”130 With the emergence of China and the

Soviet Union as strongholds of Communist ideology, the French intellectual elite came

to see revolutionary Marxism as the most compelling alternative to Western capitalism.131

However, the intense intellectual commitment to communism in postwar France must

                                                                                                               127 Pierre Bourdieu, Choses dites (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1987), 13; see also Pierre Bourdieu, “Le rapport du Collège de France. Pierre Bourdieu s’explique,” interview by Jean-Pierre Salgas, La Quinzaine Littéraire, no. 445 (1986): 8-10, quoted in Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 14. 128 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Struggle for Symbolic Order, An Interview with Pierre Bourdieu,” Theory, Culture and Society 3, no. 3 (November 1986): 35.  129 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 108n118. 130 Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 50. 131 Ibid.

  34

be considered not only as a product of its time, but also as having been conditioned, at

the turn of the century, by the watershed of the Dreyfus Affair.

At the ENS and beyond, the Dreyfus Affair marked a definitive change in

French intellectuals’ self-conception, and set a precedent for their involvement in politics

throughout the twentieth century.132 Emile Zola’s intervention in the Dreyfus case, and

the support he subsequently earned from the university graduates, professors, artists and

writers who endorsed him in protest, marked these figures’ ascent as molders of public

opinion.133 In an open letter to Republican President Félix Faure, published in L’Aurore

littéraire, artistique, sociale, Zola made dramatic use of universalist rhetoric to denounce the

case against Dreyfus, calling the unfounded accusation an “abomination” against Truth

and Justice.134 The letter, printed under the headline “J’Accuse!,” was followed the next

day in L’Aurore by the Manifesto of the Intellectuals, which carried the signatures of Anatole

France, Marcel Proust, and André Gide, among others.135

The contemporary French intellectual came into being through this founding

political gesture, by producing a physical and collective manifestation of his dissent.136 It

was Georges Clemenceau, L’Aurore’s founder, who gave the petition’s signatories the

collective title of “intellectuals,” a term that had yet to fix itself in the cultural

consciousness.137 As Jennings notes, “When signing the first of what later became many

manifestos of the intellectuals, [the signatories] appended their status and qualifications

                                                                                                               132 Jean-François Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises: Manifestes et pétitions au XXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 29. 133 Ory and Sirinelli, Intellectuels en France, 6; Read, Dreyfus Affair, 232. 134 Jennings and Kemp-Welch, Intellectuals in Politics, 24; Emile Zola quoted in Read, Dreyfus Affair, 214. 135 Read, Dreyfus Affair, 233; Ory and Sirinelli, Intellectuels en France, 6. 136 Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, 30.  137 Ory and Sirinelli, Intellectuels en France, 6; Read, Dreyfus Affair, 233.

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to their names,” in this way “cashing in” on the “public esteem accorded to their

professional status and expertise.”138 The danger, as Jennings notes, was that because

intellectuals (most frequently university professors) “spoke in the name of objective

knowledge and as the enemy of ignorance,” their opinions were privileged above others

and thus shaped public opinion, even about those problems that were “beyond their

competence” as intellectuals.139 Precisely who constituted an “intellectual,” and what was

the appropriate scope of his political action, were questions that would preoccupy the

French elite throughout the twentieth century.140

The French term “intellectuel” was thus first applied to a distinct group of social

actors in the late 1980s, when it became “common currency” in the Right’s criticism of

the Dreyfusards.141 Interestingly, as Jennings points out, the “intellectuals” comprised a

variety of socio-professional groups, including writers, scientists, philosophers, and

actors, but it specifically denoted those practitioners of letters, arts, and sciences “who

chose to enter into that area of public life defined as the world of politics.”142 Above all,

as Ory and Sirinelli suggest, the intellectual’s intervention in politics was necessarily

“manifest.”143 Rather than simply the man “who thinks,” the French intellectual was he

                                                                                                               138 Jennings, Intellectuals in Politics, 70. 139 Ibid. 140 As the following chapter illustrates, this question became particularly salient during the French-Algerian War, when the French nationalists of a new generation reanimated the spirit of 1898 with the Manifeste des intellectuels français of 1960, in which they denounced anti-militaristic and anti-colonial sentiment expressed in the Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la Guerre d’Algérie (Declaration on the Right of Insubordination in the French-Algerian War), more commonly known as the Manifeste des 121. 141 Jennings, Intellectuals in Politics, 70. 142 Ibid. 143 Ory and Sirinelli, Intellectuels en France, 9.

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who “communicates a thought;” moreover, his sphere of influence was not limited to

the academic world, but extended to address the issues of the society at large:144

The emphasis from the outset, in other words, fell upon action, but also

action in the name of a humanitarian, and preferably universal, cause. In

this case, it was the release of Captain Dreyfus, but in later years it

surfaced as, among other things, anti-Fascism and anti-colonialism.

Whether it would be opposition to Franco, American involvement in

Korea, or the use of torture in Algeria, the language deployed was that of

Truth, Justice, Reason and Universality.145

As we will see in the next chapter’s discussion of the French-Algerian War, French

intellectuals embroiled in the Algerian debate would lay competing claims to the

Dreyfusard legacy of political intervention.

Inte l l e c tual Tropes

The politicization of the intellectual did not, indeed could not, occur without

controversy. Several conflicting paradigms, each with their own distinct imperatives and

modes of analysis, emerged following the Dreyfus Affair and continued to guide debates

over the relationship between intellectual legitimacy and political action. In Génération

Intellectuelle, Jean-François Sirinelli distinguishes between a broad and a narrow

conception of the intellectual: first, a broad sociological definition, in which “the creators

and ‘mediators’” of culture are identified as such by their membership within certain

socio-professional categories: for example, journalists, writers, educators, scientists and

scholars.146 The second, narrower definition, founded on the notion of engagement,

confers to intellectuals their cultural and political particularity. According to this

                                                                                                               144  Ibid. 145 Jennings, Intellectuals in Politics, 70.

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definition, the intellectual necessarily partakes of civic life, either directly, as a political

actor, or indirectly, by serving as a “barometer” of the ideological and social currents of

his time.147 It is this second definition, centering on political action, which is contested

within debates over the status of the intellectual in political life. With this definition in

mind, three figures—Julien Benda’s “disengaged intellectual,” Raymond Aron’s

“committed observer,” and Jean-Paul Sartre’s “engaged intellectual”—mark the terrain

for our analysis of the major intellectual tropes in the period from the Dreyfus Affair to

the French-Algerian War.148

In 1927, in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, Julien Benda published La

Trahison des clercs, in which he set fort an “ideal type” of intellectual, characterized by a

“disinterested spirit, which in its ‘essential activity does not pursue practical ends.’”149

Benda conceived of the intellectual, in the words of Michel Winock, in much the same

was as Plato—as “the man of pure reason, concerned only with truth, disdainful of all

worldly interests, individual or collective.”150 Benda held the tenacious conviction that

the intellectual should abstain from particular and partisan disputes, exercising complete

objectivity and disengagement; if he chose to abdicate the ivory tower by entering the

political battlefield, as Benda had during the Dreyfus Affair, he should do so only “in the

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           146 Sirinelli, Génération intellectuelle, 9; Ory and Sirinelli, Intellectuels en France, 8. 147 Sirinelli, Génération intellectuelle, 9. 148 Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 50. 149 Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs (Paris: Livre de Poche/“Pluriel,” 1977), 200, quoted in Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels, 612. 150 Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels, 197.  

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name of ‘humanity,’ of ‘justice,’ briefly, ‘of an abstract principle, superior and directly

opposed to political passions.’”151

Benda stigmatized those intellectuals who abandoned themselves to such

passions, because by “engaging their authority in the service of particular causes, such as

race, class, and nation,” they “lost sight of their universal point of view.” 152 The

intellectuals’ true act of treason, however, was not political action itself, but the failure to

defend “the rights of reason against the assaults” leveled at it since the end of the 19th

century: “The treason of the intellectual consists not of engaging oneself in public action

[…], but in subordinating the intelligence to earthly biases.”153 In direct contradiction to

his contemporaries, whom he observed “putting themselves in the service of political

passions,” Benda did not hesitate to position himself as the exemplar of this model.154

Even Benda, however, was unable to maintain complete disengagement through

the Nazi occupation. Faced with the shock of World War II, the questions of

collaboration and resistance proved too dire for Benda to maintain a neutral stance.155

Thus, in 1946, he reissued La Trahison des clercs, having entirely changed his position on

the meaning of intellectual “treason:”

Whereas Benda’s original use of the term in the edition of 1927

addressed the intellectual temptation to wander from the path of rigor

and truth in the pursuit of political objectives, he and his postwar

contemporaries now meant by treason something close to the opposite—

                                                                                                               151 Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels, 197; ibid., 612. 152 Ibid., 197. 153 Ibid., 196. 154 Ibid., 197. 155 Judt, Past Imperfect, 50-51.

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an insistence upon following the dictates of one’s own conscience even at

the price of breaking ranks with one’s political allies.156

Benda thus went from arguing that abstention from political identification was the

intellectual’s only responsible option, to emphasizing the imperative to take a stand with

one’s political allies; to abstain from this solidarity, Benda decided, was treason.157

Benda’s reversal, far from being an isolated case, represents a greater shift that reoriented

the debate among intellectuals of the postwar period from the question of whether

intellectuals have an obligation to intervene, toward considerations of how best to do

so—a question that would become all the more urgent, for Raymond Aron especially,

with the rise of Marxist philosophy beginning in 1945.158

Beginning with L’Opium des Intellectuels, in 1955, Raymond Aron promoted a

vision of intellectual responsibility on the model of the committed observer (spectateur

engage).159 For Aron, an ENS graduate, the Dreyfus Affair represented an exceptional

moment for intellectuals because of the situation’s “moral simplicity and purity.”160

However, Aron wrote, “It is seldom possible to choose between parties, régimes, or

nations on the basis of values defined in abstract terms.”161 More often, he argued,

political conflicts are ambiguous and require “modesty, moderation, lucidity and moral

clarity,” rather than pretentions to universalism or to moral absolutes.162

                                                                                                               156 Ibid. 157 Ibid., 51. 158 William S. Lewis, Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005), 116. 159 Jennings, Intellectuals in Politics, 75. 160 Ibid.; Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 85. 161 Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (New York: Norton, 1957), 302. 162 Jennings, “Dilemmas of the Intellectual,” 75.

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Far from striving toward a perfect society or, what is worse, resigning oneself to

“the indifference and the pose of l’observateur glacé [frozen observer]” Aron’s committed

observer would bring his powers of reasoning to bear on the complex and difficult

choices that political engagement most often posed.163 In doing so, the intellectual would

need to recognize that he was “no more capable than ordinary mortals of freeing

[himself] from the logic of passions;”164 in fact, Aron proposed, intellectuals were “more

eager for justification because they are so anxious to play down the instinctual element in

themselves.”165 The want of pure rationality should not cause the intellectual to abstain

from involving himself from political struggle, but above all, Aron wished to combat

“communist mystification” of his fellow intellectuals, which blinded them from reason

and humanity with its doctrinal myths of revolution and class conflict:166

Although he will endeavor to appeal to the consciences of all parties, he

will take stand in favor of the one which appears to offer humanity the

best chance—a historical choice which involves the risk of error which is

inseparable from the historical condition. He will not refuse to become

involved, and when he participates in action he will accept its

consequences, however harsh. But he must try never to forget the

arguments of the adversary, or the uncertainty of the future, or the faults

of his own side, or the underlying fraternity of ordinary men.167

Aron’s critique of Marxism is evident, here, in his reference to an “underlying fraternity”

that serves as the basis for human history. Here again he advocates modesty and an acute

historical awareness, both of which he would fault the Communists for lacking, having

                                                                                                               163 Ibid. 164 Aron, Opium of the Intellectuals, 302. 165 Ibid. 166 Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels, 439. 167 Aron, Opium of the Intellectuals, 303.

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been seduced by “a doctrine of the nineteenth century that history has disproven.”168

Most importantly, Aron believed, the intellectual needed to take account of the “diversity

of the structures of which the present society is composed, the diversity of the problems

arising from this and of the steps necessary to solve them. Historical awareness,” he

argued, “should make this diversity clear: ideology, even when it is dressed in the tawdry

finery of the philosophy of history, obscures it.”169

Aron’s unabashed anticommunism earned him a reputation among his pears as a

“‘guard dog’ of the bourgeoisie,” but also, Winock writes, “assured his legitimacy as a

political analyst susceptible neither to blinding emotions, nor to allegiances that would

stifle the critical spirit.”170 Moreover, it set him in direct opposition to the leading

intellectual of the time, Jean-Paul Sartre, whom Winock considers, with respect to Aron,

like the opposite “side of the same coin.”171

Fellow ENS graduate Jean-Paul Sartre viewed politics as part and parcel of the

writer’s vocation,172 and indeed came to symbolize intellectual engagement in the French

cultural consciousness.173 Unlike Benda, who at first envisioned treason as a rupture with

the intellectual’s rational and objective condition, Sartre believed the intellectual’s

condition to be “one of treason virtually by definition.”174 Emerging in 1945, Sartre’s

intellectual engagé (engaged intellectual) strove for “authenticity” through his political

                                                                                                               168 Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels, 439.  169 Aron, Opium of the Intellectuals, 32. 170 Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels, 439.  171 Ibid., 608. 172 Ory and Sirinelli, Intellectuels en France, 147; Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 85. 173 Ory and Sirinelli, Intellectuels en France, 147. 174 Judt, Past Imperfect, 51.

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commitments; in doing so, he gave his life meaning and defied the “existential cowardice”

that would result from inaction.175

Sartre conceived of the intellectual as a “technician of practical knowledge” who

maintained a complex and dynamic relationship to the concept of the universal. By

“adopting a universal perspective here and now,” Sartre argued, “false intellectuals” fell

into the trap of “reassuring the established order.”176

The “true intellectual,” Sartre argued, could be “neither a moralist nor an

idealist,” but had to recognize that all conflicts—be they “class, national,

[or] racial”—were struggles between particular groups for the “statute of

universality.” The intellectual was thus obliged to take sides, “to commit

himself in every one of the conflicts of our time.”177

For Sartre, the “true intellectual” rejects the abstract universalism that serves to

perpetuate conflict (a universalism to which anyone may lay claim), and functions instead

as the harbinger of “a universalism that is ‘yet to come.’”178 He becomes ‘a guardian of

fundamental ends (the emancipation, universalization and hence humanization of man),’”

charged with enlightening the proletariat by helping it to achieve its own self-

consciousness in opposition to “the dominant ideology” of bourgeois hegemony.179

Sartre’s model of intellectual engagement, which placed the intellectual “under

the definite responsibility to acquire dirty hands,” dominated the intellectual landscape

                                                                                                               175 Ory and Sirinelli, Intellectuels en France, 147-148; Judt, Past Imperfect, 51. 176 Sartre quoted in Jennings, “Dilemmas of the Intellectual,” 72; see Jean-Paul Sartre, Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). 177 Jennings, “Dilemmas of the Intellectual,” 72. 178 Ibid., 71. 179 Ibid.

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“until the sea-change effected during the 1970s and early 1980s.180 However, Sartre’s

existentialist philosophy began to fall from favor in the early 1950s, particularly at the

ENS, which by the mid-1950s had entered a “post-existentialist” philosophical

moment.181

Inte l l e c tual Inf luences

These intellectual tropes represented the zones of action available to the young

Derrida and Bourdieu, both for negotiating contemporary political debates, and for

forming their identities as intellectuals whose status imparted an obligation of political

engagement. However, their political formations must also be considered in relation to

Louis Althusser, who as caiman at the École offered up a new reading of Marx,182 which

allowed a budding generation of Marxists to critique those dogmas they judged to be

self-propagating and outdated (such as Sartre’s), while still remaining within Communist

orthodoxy.183

As the ENS became an enclave for young Marxist intellectuals increasingly

“emancipated” from the PCF by Althusser’s influence, the intensity of students’ political

commitments necessitated equally strong intellectual commitments.184 In the aftermath

of World War II, during Derrida and Bourdieu’s time as Normaliens, the school became

                                                                                                               180 Ibid., 72. 181 See Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 103-107. 182 Lewis, Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism, 167. The basis of Althusser’s rupture with classical readings of Marx was his identification, in Capital, of a specific break in Marx’s thought, where he “abandons metaphysical speculations on the telos and essence of man and replaces this speculation with an analysis of the materialist logic of economic and social structures.” This break allowed Althusser to move toward the complex structural critique of the societal manifestations of capitalist ideology, for which he is still read today (ibid.). 183 Ory and Sirinelli, Intellectuels en France, 217. 184 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 83; Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels, 548.

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polarized between two dominant intellectual camps, the Catholics and the communists.

Baring explains,

Both [communism and Catholicism] offered an explanation for the

sufferings of the War and the trials of the occupation, and both inscribed

them into a larger picture that gave them meaning. Further, they both

adhered to metaphysical systems that claimed authority in all areas, of

academic study, not just religion or politics.185

As new interpretations of the phenomenologists Heidegger and Husserl supplanted the

Sartrean humanism that had brought them into focus, these figures came to exert a

strong attraction for the Catholics and communists, respectively, who looked to “one or

other of Sartre’s German influences for grounds to criticize existentialism.186 Neither

Derrida nor Bourdieu found an intellectual or political niche within these camps; instead,

they carved out their distinct areas of interest in relation to the enormous influences of

intellectual Marxism and Catholic phenomenology.

Leading up to his time at the ENS, Derrida in fact showed a great interest in

Sartre’s humanist existentialism, which first signaled to him the importance of reading

Husserl and Heidegger.187 In the late 1940s, he began to move away from existentialism

and the Christian themes that tended to dominate his early studies, and upon entry to the

ENS he moved still further from these influences.188 He retained, however, an interest in

Heidegger and Husserl, choosing as the topic of his dissertation for the Diplôme d’études

supérieures the problem of genesis in Husserl’s phenomenology.189

                                                                                                               185 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 97. 186 Ibid.; ibid., 107.  187 Ibid., 47. 188 Ibid., 81. 189 Derrida, “Politics and Friendship,” 184.

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While conducting this research, Derrida came up against the limitations of

structure and rhetoric that the “classical norms of the thesis” normally imposed.190

Considering Derrida’s choice of topic too obscure and difficult for the aggregation,

Althusser refused to evaluate his work, while Foucault deemed the paper to deserve

either an A+ or an F.191 “It was already clear to me that the general turn that my research

was taking could no longer conform to the classical norms of the thesis. This experience,

Derrida would later recall, signaled at the very least a formative moment in the evolution

of Derrida’s thinking, if not in the history of deconstruction itself: “The ‘research,’” he

would write, “called for not only a different mode of writing but also for a work of

transformation on the rhetoric, the staging, and the particular discursive procedures,

which, highly determined historically, dominate university discourse.”192

Derrida had been allowed to stray so radically from the accepted norms of the

university, in large part, because the restructuration of the ENS following the Dreyfus

Affair had created an atmosphere in which students were afforded an unprecedented

degree of pedagogical self-determination.193 As Baring explains, “no real teaching was

undertaken at the École, beyond the agrégation seminars run by invited professeurs délégués,”

and therefore the students were largely responsible for seeking out courses at other

institutions.194 Consequently, Baring notes, “the reform […] unintentionally opened to

the students a far greater diversity of educational possibilities than had previously been

                                                                                                               190 Jacques Derrida, “Punctuations: The Time of a Thesis,” in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 120, quoted in Wortham, Counter-Institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 4.  191 Derrida, “Politics and Friendship,” 184. 192 Derrida, “Punctuations,” 120, quoted in Wortham, Counter-Institutions, 4. 193 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 89. 194 Ibid., 90.

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the case,” and this in part explains the diversity of fields in which ENS-trained

philosophers, such as Bourdieu, eventually came to prominence in other fields.195

As one biographer of Bourdieu reminds us, his “intellectual heritage in France

was most directly shaped during the 1950s in the context of an academic world

dominated by Jean-Paul Sartre and [structural anthropologist] Claude Lévi-Strauss, and

he worked out his methods, practice, and theory largely in response to the paradigms

they had established.”196 During Sartre’s heyday, Bourdieu’s effort to resist existentialism,

as he said, “in its fashionable or academic forms,” gave him recourse to two alternative

domains: first, the history of philosophy, a field “very closely linked to the history of the

sciences” and advanced most notably by Martial Guéroult and Jules Vuillemin; or else,

the epistemology history of sciences in which Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem,

Éric Weil, and Alexandre Koyré were the major figures.197 These thinkers, Bourdieu

would later write, were “often of lower-class or provincial origin, or brought up outside

France and its academic traditions, and attached to peripheral university institutions, like

the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales or the Collège de France.”198 Indeed,

what Bourdieu termed the “space of possibilities” available to him as a scholar would

expand as he became more heavily influenced by Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl

                                                                                                               195 Ibid. 196 Reed-Danahay, Locating Bourdieu, 14. 197 Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-Analysis, 9-10. 198 Ibid., 10. Beginning in 1964, Bourdieu held a position as Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, the precursor to the EHESS; he was elected to the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France in 1981 (Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 8).

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Marx, as well as more obscure scientific figures such as Bachelard, Norbert Elias, and

Erving Goffman.199

The Royal Route: Bourdieu’s Military Service and Ethnography

In 1955, one year after his graduation from the ENS and just as Algeria entered

the second year of its struggle for independence, Bourdieu set off for the colony as a

member of the French military. He was first deployed to Versailles as a member of the

Army Psychological Services, following, he said, “a very privileged route reserved for

students of the École Normale.”200 To an apparently greater degree than his agregé peers,

however, Bourdieu was “constitutively rebellious to military authority,” 201 and this

disposition led him to engage, as he said, in “heated arguments with high-ranking

officers who wanted to convert [him] to ‘l’Algérie française.’”202 Subsequent disciplinary

actions led to his reassignment to Algeria, where he would stay to teach at the faculté de

lettres in Algiers from 1958 until 1960, until a pro-colonial coup forced him to return to

Paris.203

Socia l Sc iences

Bourdieu’s deployment to Algeria awakened his personal and scientific interest in

Algerian society and marked his conversion from philosophical to social scientific

                                                                                                               199 Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-Analysis, 30; ibid., 68; see also Reed-Danahay, Locating Bourdieu, 14. 200 Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-Analysis, 38. 201 Wacquant, “Sociological Life of Pierre Bourdieu,” 550. 202 Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-Analysis, 38. 203 Wacquant, “Sociological Life of Pierre Bourdieu,” 551.

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practice.204 In effect, Algeria served as an intellectual training ground for Bourdieu, and it

was there that he began to develop the ethnographic methods that would eventually

inform the theory of practice he elaborated in the 1970s, beginning with his Esquisse d’une

théorie de la pratique in 1972.205 Bourdieu spoke of Algeria as “a scientific and also personal

‘first love,’” which awakened him to the extraordinary circumstances of the war of

liberation, but also aroused an intellectual interest in the mundane of conditions of life,

“through contact with simple but admirable men and women in all kinds of social

positions.”206

Bourdieu positioned himself as a “quasi-native” in Algeria, identifying as such

because his roots in rural France imparted a subjective understanding of the conditions

of provincial life. 207 But the situation that Bourdieu encountered in Algeria was

remarkably different from what he, or any Parisian intellectual, could have imagined, and

his attempt comprehend the conditions with which the Algerian people contended posed

entirely different intellectual challenges from those he had encountered as a student. In

an interview with Franz Schultheis on the occasion of the photographic exhibition,

“Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria: Testimonies of Uprooting,” he described his difficulty in

collecting and analyzing data while immersed in such a foreign environment:

It is extremely difficult to speak of all this in the right way. It was far

from being a concentration camp. The conditions were dramatic, but not

as dramatic as was often claimed. And I was there and I saw it all, and it

was all so complicated and went far beyond my means! When they told

                                                                                                               204 Ibid., 550-51. 205 Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 141-142; see also Bourdieu, “Pictures from Algeria” and Sketch for a Self-Analysis. 206 Bourdieu, Sociology is a Martial Art, 265-266. 207 Reed-Danahay, Locating Bourdieu, 24.

  49

me things, it would sometime take me two or three days to understand it

all, complicated names of places or tribes, numbers of lost cattle, and

other lost commodities, and I was totally overcome by it all.”208

Bourdieu’s experience in the field necessitated an original and dynamic approach to

ethnography, and a rupture with both the politically alienated conditions of philosophy,

as well as the practically insufficient “routines of bureaucratic sociology.”209

As a philosophy student at the ENS, Bourdieu had paid little mind to the

sociological tradition of the 1940s and 1950s, which he found to be “averagely empirical,

lacking any theoretical or empirical inspiration.”210 The sociologists of the immediate

post-war period seemed to have fallen into the discipline after failing as philosophers,

rather than coming to sociology, as he did, “via the ‘royal route’—i.e. the École Normale

Supérieure and the Aggregation in philosophy:”211 Along the “royal route,” Bourdieu

encountered widespread disdain for sociology and what he perceived to be a hypocritical

attitude toward the relationship between politics and the realm of legitimate intellectual

life:

It is not exaggerated, I think, to speak of [sociology as] a pariah

discipline: the ‘devaluation’ of everything concerned with social matters,

in an intellectual milieu nonetheless very occupied and preoccupied with

politics (but many commitments, especially those in the Communist

Party, are still a paradoxical way of keeping the social world at arm’s

                                                                                                               208 Pierre Bourdieu, “Pictures from Algeria,” 24. 209 Ibid., 28. 210 Bourdieu, “Struggle for Symbolic Order,” 37. 211 Ibid.

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length), compounded—or was the primary cause of—a dominated

position within the university field.212

Even within the already dominated field of social science, sociology had yet to gain

recognition as a discipline during Bourdieu’s scolarisation, while ethnology, brought to

prominence by structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, occupied a “pre-eminent

position.”213 Upon his turn to sociology in the mid-1950s, and while disagreeing with

what he called Structuralism’s “faddish aspects,” Bourdieu would benefit from the

legitimacy that Structuralism had newly bestowed upon the social sciences through the

influence of its proponents in philosophy, such as Michel Foucault and Louis

Althusser.214

Fie ldwork

The 1950s saw the birth of a new approach to sociology that emphasized

researchers’ “involvement” and “participation,” and this was the paradigm into which

Bourdieu entered as an ethnographer in Algeria in the late 1950s.215 Bourdieu’s work

cleared a new path in field observation through its use of descriptive visual and verbal

methods, foremost among these being his innovative use of photography. 216 While in

Algeria, Bourdieu took hundreds of photographs and conducted interviews that would

inform much of his future scholarly work.217 For him, photography was an ethnographic

tool that allowed him “to come to terms with a devastating reality,” as well as “a way of

sharpening [his] eye, of looking more closely, of finding a way to approach a particular

                                                                                                               212 Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-Analysis, 35-36. 213 Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-Analysis, 15; ibid., 34. 214 Bourdieu, “Struggle for Symbolic Order,” 36; ibid., 38. 215 Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 33. 216 Pierre Bourdieu, “Pictures from Algeria,” 28. 217 Wacquant, “Sociological Life of Pierre Bourdieu,” 552.

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subject.”218 Neither photography nor ethnography was an entirely objective endeavor for

Bourdieu; rather he described how “in both cases there was this objectifying and loving,

detached and yet intimate relationship to the object.”219

Bourdieu conducted his fieldwork in a context of sustained contact with ordinary

Algerian people, and the “detached yet intimate relationship” that resulted allowed his

research to serve at once as a political indictment of colonialism, and as both a personal

and scientific exploration of provincial life.220 In the course of a decade, he published

three sociological texts about Algeria: Sociologie de l’Algérie, in 1958; Travail et travailleurs en

Algérie, in 1963; and Le Déracinement, la crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie, in 1964.221

As we will see in the next chapter, these texts served as Bourdieu’s response to the

intellectual irresponsibility he perceived in figures such Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul

Sartre, whose writings provoked Algerian nationalists to revolutionary violence rather

than providing a cautious and objective analysis of the colonial situation.222

According to Michael Grenfell, Sociologie de l’Algérie began as an activist text (“‘livre

militant’”), through which Bourdieu wished “to understand and to make understood a

phenomenon that was misrepresented in French society.”223 For Bourdieu, this meant

not only highlighting and elucidating the plight of non-European Algerians, but also

“that of the French settlers whose situation was no less dramatic, whatever else had to be

                                                                                                               218 Pierre Bourdieu, “Pictures from Algeria,” 23. 219 Ibid. 220 Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 34. 221 Wacquant, “Sociological Life of Pierre Bourdieu,” 551. 222 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 254. 223 Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 14.

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said about their racism, etc.”224 His aim was thus to give a balanced account of the

structures of domination that colonialism imposed on the entirety of Algerian society.

Compounding the indignities of the colonial situation, however, were the

enduring traumas of the War of Independence, and Bourdieu’s time in Algeria coincided

with a troubled and violent period in Algerian history.225 In 1960, the year of Bourdieu’s

departure from Algeria, Jean-Paul Sartre, backed by other leading intellectuals, published

the Manifesto of the 121, a petition accused of encouraging conscripted soldiers to desert

the French army; at the same time, the Organisation Armée Secrète (Organization of the

Secret Army or OAS) and other far-Right terrorist groups, working in both France and

Algeria, were militating against Algerian independence.226 In the midst of the chaos,

Bourdieu was charged with explaining the dynamic and destructive relationship between

colonialism and war, and its impact on the civilian population.

Many of these effects played out on the Algerian land itself, and Bourdieu’s

project, he later stated, was to illustrate “the extent to which French colonialism had

destroyed [traditional Algerian agrarian society]” 227 by analyzing “the logic and

transhistorical effects of […] sweeping compulsory resettlements of the population.”228

Bourdieu observed how traditional agricultural life had been transformed as farmers

were dispossessed of their land and cultural boundaries were effaced, replaced by large

                                                                                                               224 Pierre Bourdieu, “Struggle for Symbolic Order,” 38. 225 Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 34. 226 Ibid., 39.  227 Ibid. 228 Pierre Bourdieu, “Pictures from Algeria,” interview by Franz Schultheis, conducted at Collège de France, Paris [June 26, 2001], Sociology Magazine (London: Goldsmiths University, 2007): 27.

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tracts of farmland that European settlers either owned or sub-let.229 The Europeans

introduced foreign industries such as viniculture, and the military often created entire

villages to meet its needs. 230 Bourdieu described these phenomena as the

“destructuration” and “restructuration” of Algerian society, and his observations of this

“social ‘vivisection’” precipitated the emergence of a problematic that would guide much

of his academic work.231 Mapping Algeria’s influence onto his broader intellectual project,

he later stated:

Many of the problems that I have been led to address, such as that of the

logic of practice, and the very concepts I had to develop to resolve them

sprang from my effort to understand men and women who found

themselves thrown into an alien economic cosmos imported by

colonization, with mental schemes and dispositions, especially economic

ones, acquired in a precapitalist universe.232

Bourdieu’s observation of the Algerian people’s spatial and temporal displacement,

which resulted from the introduction of new of new modes of modes of production and

exchange, prompted the formation his ideas about location, habitus, and symbolic

violence. In the forthcoming discussion of intellectual debates around the French-

Algerian War, we will see further evidence of the development of this theoretical

framework within Bourdieu’s critique of the dominant analyses of the Algerian situation.

Bourdieu would eventually apply his field theory to his culture of origin, in order to

comprehend the French agricultural lifestyle in decline.233 Although in Algeria, unlike

                                                                                                               229 Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 44. 230 Ibid. 231 Ibid. 232 Bourdieu, Sociology is a Martial Art, 266. 233 See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, “The Bachelors’ Ball: The Crisis of Peasant Society in Béarn,” trans. Richard Nice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

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France, this transition occurred through a colonial occupation that “skewed the direction

of social developments,”234 in these and future cases his research responded to a pressing

concern for the impact of modernization—and later globalization—on individuals

“whose world had passed by.”235

Personal Trans formation

In addition to allowing him to experiment with the methodological tools for his

nascent theory of practice and awakening him to economic injustices that would arouse

his concern throughout his sociological career, investigating Algeria proved to be a

transformative personal experience for Bourdieu. Having been frustrated by the “overt

classism” of the ENS and of the French academic system in general, which he perceived

as biased toward bourgeois héritiers,236 Bourdieu spent his time as a boarder in “silent fury”

at the teachers’ domination of pupils, and the pupils’ exploitation of one another.237 He

thus observed a parallel between his experience at the ENS and “the moral subjugation

he felt when sent to Algeria to ‘pacify’ resistance.” 238 Bourdieu’s work in Algeria

provided the first occasion for exercising his particular, and somewhat contradictory,

breed of scientific self-reflexivity, which allowed him to draw on the authority of his

social origins in order to understand others’ circumstances, and also to examine

objectively the structures of his personal experience.239 In doing so, he discovered a

connection between the culture of his youth and the insular Kabyle group that inhabited

the colony’s northern region:

                                                                                                               234 Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 55. 235 Ibid. 236 Ibid., 62. 237 Ibid., 10. 238 Ibid. 239 Reed-Danahay, Locating Bourdieu, 24; see also Bourdieu, Invitation to Reflexive Sociology.

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Algeria permitted me to accept myself. The comprehensive ethnographic

look I gave to Algeria, I also took of myself, of the people of my country,

of my parents, the accent of my father, my mother… I could see the

similarities between the people in Kabylia and those with whom I had

spent my youth.240

Bourdieu was thus indebted to Algeria, personally as well as intellectually, for the insight

that his outsider’s perspective could offer into social phenomena that were initially too

familiar to observe objectively, and he eventually turned the methods and perspective he

acquired in Algeria back onto the French agrarian culture from which he came. As Reed-

Danahay writes, Bourdieu “moved back and forth between France and Algeria in his

theoretical formations,” 241 and in this sense, his intellectual formation had a

fundamentally transnational character.

Conclusion

As we have seen, an inverse trajectory brought the Algerian-born Derrida to the

French capital at the tail end of the colonial period, while Bourdieu set off for the colony

as a soldier in the French army on the eve of its independence. As Derrida would remark

in his 2002 seminar, his and Bourdieu’s unique relationships to Algeria fostered different

affinities that would inform the philosophical and political stances they adopted in

response to the Algerian crises of the 1960s and 1990s. I hope to have illustrated, in this

chapter, the transnational character of Derrida and Bourdieu’s political and intellectual

formations, in light of which, we may better understand their actions in response to the

Black Decade. Specifically, we begin to see how Derrida and Bourdieu’s experiential and

                                                                                                               240 Pierre Bourdieu, Images d’Algérie (Paris: Actes Sud, 2003), 42, quoted in Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 15.

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intellectual understandings of Franco-Algerian relations, coupled with their

commitments to the French republican values of liberty and justice, would lead them to

come to the defense of Algerian intellectuals in hopes of ensuring Algeria’s democratic

future.

The seeds of Derrida’s political allegiances were clearly planted on Algerian soil.

As a Sephardic Jew growing up in colonial Algeria, his exclusion from the French

community in Algeria intensified his desire for integration as a citizen of the French

republic; simultaneously, and in opposition to this desire for belonging, this exclusion

also shaped Derrida’s thinking about the transience of institutional bonds, and his

sensitivity to the uncertain status of immigrants and sans-papiers (undocumented

foreigners), whose rights he would defend in the 1980s and 1990s from within his

elective milieu of the Parisian academy.242 The themes that would become central to

Derrida’s deconstructive project, such as “the ambivalence of identity, our relationship

to language, and the aporias of autonomy,” may thus be better understood in light of the

historical forces that weighed on Derrida throughout his childhood and education.243

The question of hospitality, a major theme in Derrida’s later work, may also be

brought to bear on his early life. As we have seen, Sephardic Jews occupied a marginal

position in Algerian society, having been bestowed with—and later stripped of—French

citizenship. Their uneasy relationship to the Algerian Muslim majority reinforced the

sense of foreignness with which Derrida lived from a young age, although he

nonetheless developed a deep fondness for Algeria’s culture and its people, which he

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           241 Reed-Danahay, Locating Bourdieu, 18-19. 242 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 20. 243 Ibid., 16.

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would fondly refer to as his “nostalgérie.”244 In this light, we may therefore understand

Derrida’s youth, in Algeria and later in France, as having been punctuated by instances of

both hospitality and inhospitality, acceptance and rejection, openness and enclosure;

conceived in such terms, Derrida’s relationship to self and others reveals a particular

understanding of culture and ethics as a negotiation between “guests” and “hosts.”

For Bourdieu, as a guest in Algeria, researching in Algeria offered a window onto

the patterns and particularities of lifestyles in decline, and would later allow him apply an

ethnographic lens to the context and culture into which he had been socialized. And

although Bourdieu gained firsthand knowledge of Algeria’s suffering under colonial rule

and during its intense battle for independence, Kamel Chachoua seems correct in

characterizing Bourdieu’s “‘affective and elective’ affinity” with Algeria as “effectively

more social and sociological than political; an affinity more comprehensible in terms of

his (rural) social origins than through considerations of politics or activism.245

As we will see in the following chapter’s discussion of the Algerian War,

Bourdieu strove to maintain political neutrality by taking on a doggedly scientific role in

debates over Algerian independence. Nonetheless, while in Algeria he learned, as he

would later write, “that intellectual rivalries could, when the occasion presented itself,

take the most violent forms.”246 While at the University of Algiers, Bourdieu came up

against a strong Orientalist tradition among his “ultraconservative colleagues,” the

                                                                                                               244 Derrida and Bennington, Jacques Derrida, 330. 245 Kamel Chachoua, “Pierre Bourdieu et L’Algérie: Le Savant et la Politique,” Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée 131 (June 2012): n.p. “L’affinité affective et élective de P. Bourdieu avec l’Algérie est en effet plus sociale et sociologique que politique. Une affinité plus compréhensible par son origine sociale (paysanne) plutôt que par des considérations politiques ou militantes” (ibid.). 246 Bourdieu, Sociology is a Martial Art, 266.

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Islamic “specialists” among whom, he says, tended to treat the religion as “a deobolus ex

machina, the ultimate explanatory factor of all time lags and archaisms.”247 Bourdieu’s

attacks on his conservative colleagues earned him a reputation as a “liberal,” and over

the course of the war he found himself twice threatened with death: on May 13, 1958,

having been placed by his colleagues, he believed, on a “‘red list’ of individuals to be

‘neutralized,’” he was forced into hiding;248 and again, two years later, he would have to

return precipitously to Paris on the occasion of a military coup.249 The violence with

which Bourdieu was threatened did not, however, cause him to retreat from the

intellectual front lines—instead, he continued to battle misconceptions about Algerian

culture using, as he would say, “all the weapons at his disposal.” 250

                                                                                                               247 Ibid. 248 Ibid.  249 Wacquant, “Sociological Life of Pierre Bourdieu,” 552. 250 Bourdieu, Sociology is a Martial Art, 266.

CHAPTER TWO: French-Algerian War, 1954-1962

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Introduction

As we have seen from our examination of Derrida and Bourdieu’s intellectual

and political formations in the previous chapter, these figures’ initiation into the highly

politicized world of postwar French intellectual life necessitated difficult choices about

how to position themselves within an academic milieu divided between Christians—

readers of Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel—and communists, a heterogeneous group

united at the ENS under the tutelage of Louis Althusser.251 The strong Catholic and

communist influences at the ENS of the early-to-mid 1950s meant that even pupils such

as Derrida and Bourdieu, “who had no direct affiliation to the Catholic circle or the

communist cellule,” were attuned to “the political and cultural valences attributed to

philosophical ideas.”252 As we have seen, both Derrida and Bourdieu especially wished to

keep their distance from intellectual Marxism, whose ideological force and political

manifestation through communism they considered problematic, even if they sometimes

agreed with its social objectives. This became the case, perhaps more than ever, in the

context of the French-Algerian War.

Between 1957 and 1959, after passing the agrégation, Derrida and Bourdieu

frequently saw one another in Algiers, where Bourdieu held a post as a professor of

Sociology, while Derrida was deployed in the French military as a private school teacher

in nearby Koléa.253 These sustained connections to Algeria put Derrida and Bourdieu at

odds with those intellectuals—in Paris and elsewhere—who appeared to use the war as a

platform for augmenting their intellectual prestige, and made both men reluctant to take

                                                                                                               251 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 3. 252 Ibid. 253 Derrida and Bennington, Jacques Derrida, 330.

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a stand publicly on the questions of reconciliation, independence, and national identity.

Describing the political culture of this period, James D. Le Sueur writes, “The [French

Algerian War] forced intellectuals to rethink their notions of selfhood and nationalism,

which until then had been bound to notions of universalism. This rethinking in turn

called into question the foundational ideas of modern France (such as liberty, equality,

fraternity).”254 Despite Derrida’s desire for privacy on the question of Algeria, and

Bourdieu’s rigorous attempt to maintain scientific objectivity and political neutrality,

neither took these questions lightly, as they weighed heavily on the collective conscience

of the time.255

The decolonization of Algeria was, as Todd Shepard argues, “the most traumatic

case of decolonization in the French Empire” and a watershed moment for French

political culture.256 This historical moment, for reasons cited by Le Sueur above, set the

intellectual precedent for the events of May 1968 “and the accompanying rethinking of

post-enlightenment conceptions of politics, values—such as the Rights of Man,

rationality, and universalism—and possibilities for progress.”257 Most importantly, the

question of the intellectual’s role as a defender of republican values—an issue first raised

in the context of the Dreyfus Affair—came once again to the forefront during the

French-Algerian War.

                                                                                                               254 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 357. 255 Chachoua, “Pierre Bourdieu et l’Algérie,” n.p. 256 Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 4. 257 Ibid., 5. For more on the genealogical links between the French-Algerian War and the events of 1968 in France, Shepard refers to Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York: Routledge, 1990); Kristen Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), and May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

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In what follows, I will examine the trajectories and influences available to

Derrida and Bourdieu in constructing their positions with regard to this important event

in France’s political and cultural history. Taking Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential Marxism as

a point of departure, I will work through the alternative models to which Derrida and

Bourdieu had recourse in their attempts to engage differently with the Algerian question.

The model proffered by the prominent anti-communist Raymond Aron will be most

relevant to the case of Bourdieu, while the pieds noir Albert Camus and the Islamic

scholar Louis Massignon will serve as the principal references for Derrida’s non-

dialectical pacifism.

The Intellectual Situation

Jean-Paul Sartre, the intellectual superstar of postwar France whose influence

loomed large over the young Derrida and Bourdieu, was one of the first French

intellectuals to take a stand against French Algeria. Specifically, from the Liberation of

Paris in 1944 to the FLN’s public emergence in 1954, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s

journal Les Temps Modernes provided one of very few metropolitan venues for arguing in

favor of Algerian independence.258 The breed of anti-colonialism spawned within the

pages of Les Temps Modernes employed “the language of Sartrean existentialism” to

present decolonization as the “historically determined struggle” of a “liberatory,

anticolonial nationalism.”259

                                                                                                               258 Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 63-64. 259 Ibid. The young philosopher Francis Jeanson was first to propound this vision in an article published in Les Temps Modernes; his argument, as Shepard describes, “provided the theoretical foundations for the Temps Modernes group’s embryonic support for Algerian

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The Temps Modernes group’s support for Algerian nationalism set Sartre, Beauvoir,

and company in sharp opposition to the republican Left, which, as Shepard explains,

“encompassed both the established political parties and the emerging ‘new Left’” at this

time.260 The new Left critics, in contradistinction to Sartre’s camp, focused their early

protests against the war on the question of torture.261 As Shepard explains, the members

of the new Left “situated their campaigns against torture within the larger vision of

republicanism, in what they presented as a particularly French tradition of the defense of

the Rights of Man.”262 Pierre Vidal-Nacquet, himself a prominent campaigner against

torture, has labeled this group of antiwar campaigners the new “Dreyfusards,” as their

mode of engagement drew upon the legacy of “the fin-de-siècle defenders of Alfred

Dreyfus” to frame the contention that “the Algerian War, which entailed constant

violations of republican values, posed a danger to the [French] Republic.”263 Unlike

Sartre’s coterie, these “defenders of the republic” did not initially extend their argument

to support Algerian independence or the FLN.264

As these divergences illustrate, the French-Algerian War brought about harsh

divisions within the French left and sparked an identity crisis of sorts among intellectuals.

Having observed this, Bourdieu would later remark that the Algerian situation was an

“exceptional touchstone” for “the individual or collective position-takings of

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           independence. After the war began, Sartre proceeded to amplify the analysis Jeanson had set forth (ibid.). 260 Ibid., 64. The “new Left” to which Shepard refers here is not to be confused with the New Left that emerged in the late 1960s (ibid.). 261 Ibid., 67. 262 Ibid. 263 Ibid. 264 Ibid.

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intellectuals,” albeit one that was responsible for his “disenchantment” in this regard.265

Witnessing debates about Algeria, that is, presented Bourdieu with a more “realistic” and

sober understanding of an intellectual’s ability to understand and to participate

effectively in the most complex political situations.266

The Alger ian Other

Throughout the French-Algerian War, debates over reconciliation,

decolonization, and the future of Franco-Algerian relations centered on the questions of

the political responsibility of the intellectual and the legitimate sphere of the intellectual’s

political action. In Le Sueur’s analysis, “the question of intellectual legitimacy served as

an approximate compass in the debates over decolonization,” and engendered deeper

considerations of “complex issues relating to the politics of representation and self-

definition.” 267 The question of alterity, in particular—and the related question of

violence—became intricately bound up in reconsiderations of identity formation and the

politics of representation; this was especially true of the war’s middle phases, by which

time most scholars had given up on the question of Franco-Muslim reconciliation that

had been the focus of earlier debates.268

The concept of the Other, as it figured in these debates, called into question the

relationship between intellectuals’ political concerns and their efforts to understand

identity theoretically, and necessitated serious considerations about “how […]

violence”—especially revolutionary violence—“relates to attempts to represent

                                                                                                               265 Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-Analysis, 36. 266 Ibid. 267 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 257. 268 Ibid., 9.

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identity.”269 In Les Intellectuels en France de l’Affaire Dreyfus à Nos Jours, Ory and Sirinelli

argue that in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, the French intellectual was “no longer

defined by what he is, his function, his statute; but by what he does, his intervention on

the political terrain, understood in the sense of public debate.”270 From the Dreyfus

Affair onward, Ory and Sirinelli write, “the content of the intellectual’s intervention will

be conceptual, insofar as it supposes the use of abstract notions, with no necessity to

concretize the concepts in question. Their usage will suffice.”271 Quite in line with this

description, French intellectuals used the concept of the Other to serve diverse political

agenda, but it was always evoked with the intention either “to foster or to destroy

tolerance” between French and Algerians.272

Those in favor of Algerian independence were most likely to deploy the concept

of the Other to justify their position.273 Beginning with his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The

Wretched of the Earth, Sartre most famously propounded an existential Marxist theory of

radical otherness that justified violence as a means to revolutionary ends.274 Together,

Sartre and Fanon articulated a vision of Third Worldism (tiers-mondisme) that cast the

“Third World proletariat” in violent opposition to a Western capitalist class:

                                                                                                               269 Ibid. 270 Ory and Sirinelli, Intellectuels en France, 9. “Des circonstances fondatrices de l’Affaire peut pourtant aisément se déduire un premier critère rigoureux, qui réoriente singulièrement la perspective : l’intellectuel ne se définit plus alors par ce qu’il est, une fonction, un statut, mais par ce qu’il fait, son intervention sur le terrain du politique, compris au sens de débat sur la ‘cité’” (ibid). 271 Ibid. “Et dans son contenu la manifestation intellectuelle sera conceptuelle, en ce sens qu’elle supposera le maniement de notions abstraites. Nulle nécessité, là non plus, de produire les concepts en question. L’usage en suffira” (ibid.). 272 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 215. 273 Ibid., 9. 274 Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 63-64. See also Jean-François Sirinelli, “Les intellectuels français en guerre d’Algérie,” in La guerre d’Algérie et les Intellectuels Français, ed. Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-François Sirinelli (Paris, Gallimard, 1990), 19-20.

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[I]n using the Other to stand in for Algerian nationalists, the so-called

avant-garde Marxists [...] were quite willing to condone the violence of

Algerian nationalists because this violence could be interpreted (and

therefore justified) as a legitimate response to the capitalist West. Many,

such as Sartre, attempted to coopt Algerian nationalism by spinning it

into the vortex of the popular metanarrative, the myth of the Third

World proletariat.275

The tiers-mondistes expressed their support for the FLN within the Marxist framework of a

universal struggle against oppression that united the Algerian movement with those in

Castro’s Cuba, Mao’s China, and wherever the liberty of the majority was at stake.276 As

Shepard explains, the tiers-mondistes employed the concept of “the colonized” to stand in

for Marx’s “working class;” the relationship between colonizer and colonized thus

replaced that between proletariat and bourgeoisie in Third Wordlist political analyses.277

The Third Worldist vision that Sartre and Fanon propounded was based on a

dichotomous vision of the “colonized” and “colonizer” as radically opposed. Tiers-

mondisme relied on the concept of the Other to maintain this absolute theoretical

distinction, often placing the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed

within a Hegelian dialectical framework. During the later phases of the war, especially,

Sartre and other major theorists “placed the question of violence in a theoretical

framework—generally a dialectical one,” in which violence was “rooted [...] in problems

arising from existential phenomenology and the dialectics of the Self-Other

distinction.”278

                                                                                                               275 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 11. 276 Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 72. 277 Ibid. 278 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 10.

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Hegel ian Foundat ions

Of course, the concept of the Other as a tool for theorizing identity did not

emerge spontaneously from the French-Algerian War. As Le Sueur explains, “It was on

French soil during the 1930s and 1940s that intellectuals planted the philosophically

imported seeds, eventually bringing the concept to full fruition.”279 French intellectuals

such as Sartre, wishing to distance themselves from the “French neo-Kantian

epistemological tradition,” looked once again to Germany—through the figures of

Husserl, Heidegger, and especially Hegel—for help in “bridg[ing] the gap between lived

experiences and the rigors of epistemology.” 280 The shift toward Hegelian

phenomenology, in particular, resulted in “the centering of the Other in social theory”

over the course of the 1930s and 1940s, a shift that Le Sueur describes as “represent[ing]

the intellectuals’ concern with history itself and with centrality of struggle.”281

As Judith Butler describes in Subjects of Desire, the experience of world war in

Europe provided a hospitable context for the reception of Hegel’s work in France;

Butler writes, “The intense interest in Hegel during the 1930s and 1940s in France

appealed to widely shared and long-suppressed intellectual and political needs” that

accompanied the “the destruction of institutions and ways of life, the mass annihilation

and sacrifice of human life” during the war.282 Hegel provided French philosophers with

                                                                                                               279 Ibid., 9. 280 Ibid. 281 Ibid. 282 Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 61.

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“a way to discern reason in the negative, [...] to derive the transformative potential from

every experience of defeat.”283 Butler explains,

The negative is also human freedom, human desire, the possibility to create

anew; the nothingness to which human life had been consigned was thus at

once the possibility of renewal. The nonfactual is at once the entire realm of

possibility. The negative showed itself in Hegelian terms not merely as death,

but as a sustained possibility of becoming. As a being that also embodies

negativity, the human being was revealed as able to endure the negative

precisely because he could assimilate and recapitulate negation in the form of

free action.284

The “ontological principle of negation” that Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit introduced

was historically interpreted, Butler explains, “as a principle of destruction,” but its appeal,

for Sartre especially, lay in its potential to be understood “as a creative principle as

well.”285

The introduction of Hegel’s Phenomenology was first in a sequence of movements

that transformed the philosophical underpinnings of the French left;286 the shift that

began with the “Hegelian renaissance” of 1930s was followed, in the 1940s, by the

translation into French of Marx’s complete works.287 For Sartre, whose ultimate political

and philosophical commitment was to an existential conception of human freedom, the

synthesis of Hegel’s negative dialectic with Marxist historicism provided the basis for an

                                                                                                               283 Ibid., 63. 284 Ibid., 62. 285 Ibid., 63. 286 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 9-10. 287 Ibid., 10.

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“analytic description of decolonization as an internalized and deeply political process”

through which historical progress would be achieved.288

As we saw in the previous chapter, Bourdieu and Derrida’s shared aversion to

communism set them apart from their ENS-trained peers, but their distaste for

Existential Marxism in particular was commonplace in a philosophical milieu that had

outgrown its fascination with Sartre. In the context of the French-Algerian War, the

violence entailed by Fanon’s colonial radicalism, and Sartre’s revision of it, put Derrida

and Bourdieu dramatically at odds with far-left interpretations of the conflict. The

alignment between Sartre’s philosophical project and his political engagement in the fight

for Algerian independence did, however, earn him the support of a considerable faction

of leftist intellectuals; as Shepard explains, “By the early 1960s, Sartre was at the hub of a

small yet very visible constellation of intellectuals and militants” who espoused the

“Sartrean critique” elaborated in The Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960).289 This expansion

of Sartre’s following coincided with Derrida and Bourdieu’s departure from Algeria, and

the high-profile confrontation between Sartre and the defenders of the colonial status

quo served as the immediate context for their return to the Metropole.290

The Batt l e o f Pet i t ions

By late spring of 1956, two opposing intellectual camps had begun to solidify in

favor of either “négociation” of “pacification,” with no mention thus far of ending France’s

colonial rule in Algeria.291 At this phase in the conflict, Algeria presented the intellectuals

                                                                                                               288 Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 72. 289 Ibid., 71. 290 Wacquant, “Sociological Life of Pierre Bourdieu,” 552; Derrida and Bennington, Jacques Derrida. Derrida returned to Paris in 1959; Bourdieu, in 1960. 291 Sirinelli, “Guerre d’Algérie,” 287.

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of the left with a primarily ethical conflict,292 in which opinions tended to diverge

between those who denounced the choice of a military solution for Algeria (“pacification”),

and the methods this would entail, and those who opposed what appeared to them as

the abandonment of the emancipatory mission that had served as the foundation and

justification for France’s colonial enterprise.293

Against this weakly polarized backdrop, Sartre stood out in stark opposition to

the endurance of French imperialism. On January 27, 1956, delivering a speech at a

meeting of the Comité d’Action des Intellectuels contre la Poursuite de Guerre en Afrique du Nord

(Action Committee of Intellectuals against the Continuation of the War in North Africa),

in Paris’s Salle Wagram, Sartre “began with [this] historical exegesis of colonialism in

Algeria:”294

Colonialism is in the process of self-destructing. But it still pollutes the

atmosphere: it is our shame, it mocks our laws, or caricatures them; it

infects us with its racism […]. Our role is to help it to die. […] The only,

and most important, thing that we can and must attempt is to fight

alongside the Algerian people so as to deliver simultaneously the Algerian

and the French people from colonial tyranny.295

Sartre’s words foreshadow the dramatic turn that the debates over the war would take in

the following years. By the beginning of the 1960s, these debates took on a more

                                                                                                               292 Ibid., 288. 293 Ibid. 294 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Le colonialisme est un système,” Situations, V (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 47-48, first published in Les Temps Modernes 123, March-April 1956; Sirinelli, “Guerre d’Algérie,” 277; Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 64. 295 Ibid. “[L]e colonialisme est en train de se détruire lui-même. Mais il empuantit encore l’atmosphère : il est notre honte, il se moque de nos lois ou les caricature ; il nous infecte de son racisme [...]. Notre rôle, c’est de l’aider à mourir. [...] La seule chose que nous

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political and ideological character;296 the “battle of the petitions” that occurred in autumn

of 1960 testifies to this evolution. Not surprisingly, Sartre’s role as a “far-left

troublemaker” placed him on the front lines of this battle, in which the most “radical”

partisans in the conflict among French intellectuals publicly took up arms against one

another.297

The “Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Alérie”

(“Manifesto for the Right to Resist the Algerian War,” better known as the Manifeste des

121) is one of the most famous texts to have been produced by French intellectuals

during the postwar period.298 Written by Sartre and signed by one hundred twenty-one

artists, writers, and academics, the petition carried the names of high-profile figures such

as André Mandouze, Maurice Blanchot, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Alain

Resnais, and André Breton, as well as Derrida’s philosophy teacher from the Lycée Ben

Aknoun, Jean Czarnecki.299 In addition to their political opposition to colonialism, the

French military’s use of torture in suppressing Algerian resistance weighed heavily on

this group, which by evoking the right of “insoumission” in the petition’s title asserted “the

right of French citizens to resist their government, even to assist its enemies, in defense

of universal values.”300 It was the 121’s belief that “the cause of the Algerian people,

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           puissions et devrions tenter—mais c’est aujourd’hui l’essentiel—c’est de lutter à ses côtes pour délivrer à la fois les Algériens et les Français de la tyrannie coloniale” (ibid.). 296 Sirinelli, “Guerre d’Algérie,” 288. 297 Ibid., 288-289. The year 1960 stands out as a particularly significant period of debate, with 18 petitions concerning Algeria appearing in Le Monde that year; in comparison, Le Monde published 9 petitions concerning Algeria in 1959 and 10 in 1961 (ibid.) 298 Ibid.; Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, 343; Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 71. 299 “Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie,” Vérité-Liberté 4, September-October 1960, 12. Full text republished in Sirinelli, Intellectuels et Passions Françaises, 343-347. 300 Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 72.

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which contributes in a decisive fashion to the destruction of the colonial system, is the

cause of all free men.”301

The anti-military and anti-colonial convictions expressed in the Manifeste

provoked a severe backlash in France, causing the journal Vérité-Liberté, in which it

appeared in September 1960, to be seized on October 14 of that year, and the journal’s

publisher to be formally charged with inciting soldiers to rebel.302 Les Temps Modernes, the

journal that Sartre and Beauvoir had founded, was also set to publish the Manifeste in its

October edition, but the publisher’s refusal resulted in two blank pages where the

petition would have appeared. 303 Thus, although it was printed in several foreign

publications, and was announced, with the final proposals included, in the newspaper Le

Monde, the petition was not immediately available for the French public to read in full.304

As the next strike in the battle, a counter-petition carrying more than three

hundred signatures appeared in October.305 With a title that signaled its signatories’

attempt to position themselves as the inheritors of the Dreyfusard legacy, the Manifeste

des intellectuels français denounced the 121’s “scandalous declaration” as an attack “against

[France], against the values it represents—and against the West.”306 The signatories, this

                                                                                                               301 “Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission,” in Sirinelli, Intellectuels et Passions Françaises, 346. “La cause du peuple algérien, qui contribue de façon décisive à ruiner le système colonial, est la cause de tous les hommes libres” (ibid.). 302 Sirinelli, “Guerre d’Algérie,” 289. This was a contention, if not a reality, that French nationalists levied against the signatories of the Manifeste des 121 (ibid.). 303 Ibid. 304 Ibid. 305 Ibid., 290. 306 “Manifeste des intellectuels français,” full text republished in Sirinelli, Intellectuels et Passions Françaises, 349. The document was published October 7, 1960 in Le Figaro and Le Monde and on October 12, 1960 in Carrefour. Other publications printed parts of the text along with the names of some signatories. On October 13, Le Figaro published the names of roughly 150 individuals who had added their names to those of the 185 original

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time claiming equal title to the “intellectual” moniker, denounced Sartre’s anti-

republicanism in the name of French nationalism, arguing that the 121 had incited

“young Frenchmen to disobedience and desertion by declaring these crimes justified.”307

Calling the French-Algerian War “a fight imposed on France by a minority of fanatical,

terrorist, and racist rebels,” 308 the Intellectuels français defended France’s “social and

humane civilizing mission” against the attacks of French and Algerian anti-colonialists.309

Moreover, in a direct nod to preceding debates about intellectual legitimacy, they argued

that by “poisoning” France’s conscience and “intoxicating public opinion, causing other

countries to believe that the French people desire the abandonment of Algeria and the

mutilation of its territory,” the 121 had committed “one of the most cowardly forms of

treason.”310

Pierre Bourdieu, Committed Observer?

In an essay published the following year, Bourdieu contested the Intellectuels

français’ claim that the French-Algerian War was a struggle imposed by a fanatical few. In

what seems a direct rejoinder to this argument, Bourdieu wrote, “To claim that the war

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           signatories. “Le public français a vu paraître [...] un certain nombre de declarations scandaleuses. Ces exhibitions constituent la suite logique d’une série d’actions [...] contre notre pays, contre les valeurs qu’il représente—et contre l’Occident” (ibid.). 307 Ibid., 349-350. “À appeler les jeunes Français à l’insoumission et à la désertion—en déclarant ces crimes ‘justifiés’” (ibid.). 308  Ibid., 350. “La guerre en Algérie est une lutte imposée à la France par une minorité de rebelles fanatiques, terroristes et racistes, conduits par des chefs dont les ambitions personnelles sont évidentes—armés et soutenus financièrement par l’étranger” (ibid.).  309 Ibid. “Nul n’ignore, au surplus, qu’à côté des tâches qui lui sont propres, cette armée accomplit depuis des années une mission civilizatrice, sociale et humaine à laquelle tous les témoins de bonne foi ont rendu publiquement hommage” (ibid.). 310 Ibid., 351. “C’est une des formes les plus lâches de la trahison que d’empoisonner, jour après jour, la conscience de la France—d’intoxiquer son opinion publique—et de

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was imposed upon the Algerian people by a handful of ringleaders who resorted to

compulsion and trickery is to deny the fact that the struggle was able to draw on popular

sentiment for its vital strength and purpose.”311 Instead, Bourdieu argued, the “popular

sentiment” that had allowed the revolutionary movement to take hold had “its basis in

an objective situation,” which was itself a direct product of the colonial system.312

As an ethnographer in Algeria, Bourdieu developed a social-scientific

understanding of Franco-Algerian relations that put him at odds with the dominant

intellectual analyses of the conflict. In 1986, reflecting on intellectual debates about

reconciliation and the true effects of the war on Algerian and French society, Bourdieu

recalled: “I was appalled by the gap between the French intellectuals about this war and

how it should be brought to an end, and my own experiences.”313 While he claimed, in

this late interview, to have agreed “with the actions of some intellectuals,” namely

Francis Jeanson, Pierre Vidal-Nacquet, and even Sartre, who took a stand “against

torture and for peace,” Bourdieu articulated his desire “to contribute in [his] own

way.”314 Most of all, Bourdieu’s wariness of the utopianism implicit in revolutionary

politics would cause him to take a more measured approach; in his words, “I was […]

concerned about the associated utopianism since in my view it was not at all helpful,

even for an independent Algeria, to feed a mythical conception of Algerian society.”315

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           faire croire à l’étranger que le pays souhaite l’abandon de l’Algérie et la mutilation du territoire” (ibid.). 311 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Revolution Within the Revolution,” The Algerians (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 145. 312 Ibid. 313 Bourdieu, “Struggle for Symbolic Order,” 38. 314 Ibid. 315 Ibid.  

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The French Algerian War therefore placed Bourdieu, as he would later describe,

“between camps as far as intellectual life was concerned.”316 As Kamel Chachoua

explains, the young ethnographer was neither a “fierce indépendantiste” nor a “partisan” of

colonialism.317 In fact, on the pro-colonial side, “the active militants for French Algeria”

rejected his ethnographic work (deeming his texts no more precious than ‘cabbage

leaves’), and refused to recognize him as a legitimate authority on Algerian culture.”318

Bourdieu’s relationship to Algerian independence movements war far more amicable, as

his position at the University of Algiers brought him into close proximity to individuals

fighting for independence, and although he never showed overt solidarity with their

cause, he was indeed sympathetic to it.319

“As a social scientist, not a revolutionary,” Bourdieu prioritized social-scientific

objectivity over political partisanship, and thus aimed to “offer a cautious and objective

evaluation of the revolution.”320 To do so was especially important, Bourdieu believed,

because it seemed to him that “the French people at that time, whether they were for or

against Algerian independence, had in common the fact of understanding very poorly

this area and its people, and they had just as bad reasons to be for independence as to be

against it.”321 He envisioned his role, therefore, as that of a politically neutral analyst,

“furnishing not only the French people [...], but also the educated Algerians [...], with the

                                                                                                               316 Ibid.  317 Chachoua, “Pierre Bourdieu et l’Algérie,” n.p. 318 Ibid. 319 Ibid. As Chachoua notes, a similar situation would characterize Bourdieu’s orientation toward the events of May 1968 in France, “toward which he was sincerely sympathetic but also greatly suspicious” (ibid.). 320 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 252. 321 Pierre Bourdieu, “Entre amis,” Awal: Cahiers d’études berbères 21 (2000): n.p. “[L]es Français à l’époque, qu’ils soient pour ou contre l’indépendance de l’Algérie, avaient pour

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elements for judgment, for adequate comprehension” of the complex situation they

faced.322

Crit ique o f Third Worldism

Beginning in the mid-1950s Bourdieu became one of the foremost theorists to

“unequivocally [reject] Fanon and Sartre’s analyses of colonial identity and anticolonial

violence.”323 Specifically, Bourdieu was one of the few French intellectuals to criticize the

fallacy, and ultimately the danger, of casting the anti-colonial struggle as a class conflict

and imposing a Marxist revolutionary framework on a colonial situation with its own

particular dynamics and antagonisms.324 In his view, Sartre provided the paradigmatic

example of political radicalism taken to dangerous theoretical extremes—and Fanon

figured within this paradigm as Sartre’s violent Third-World counterpart.

Fanon, a Martiniquais psychiatrist and writer who had been educated in France,

became, over the course of the French-Algerian War, the spokesman and philosopher of

the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN).325 After being expelled from Algeria in 1957,

Fanon traveled to Tunis to join the FLN’s “political and intellectual elite.”326 Thus

installed within the FLN’s leaders, he became “one of the most vocal critics of the

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           point commun de très mal connaître ce pays, et ils avaient d’aussi mauvaises raisons d’être pour que d’être contre” (ibid.). 322 Ibid. “Il était donc très important de fournir les éléments d’un jugement, d’une compréhension adéquate, non seulement aux Français de l’époque, mais aussi aux Algériens instruits qui pour des raisons historiques ignoraient souvent leur propre société” (ibid.). 323 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 249.  324 Ibid.; see also Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu. 325 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 184. For a complete biography of Fanon, see also Frantz Fanon: A Life, by David Macey (London, Granta Books, 2000). 326 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 184.

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French left,” many of whose members still harbored illusions of reconciliation.327 The

desire for reconciliation, Fanon believed, prevented French intellectuals from viewing

revolution favorably; “driven by democratic paternalism,” these liberals tried “to

influence the revolutionaries by criticizing the nationalists’ methods.”328 Against the

French left’s elevated self-conception, Fanon argued that “one of the first duties of

intellectuals and democratic elements in colonialist countries is unreservedly to support

the national aspirations of colonized peoples.”329

Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and Sartre’s preface to it, would become “two

of the most influential writings on violence” to come out of the war. In both texts,

Fanon and Sartre used the concept of identity not only to establish a fundamental

difference between the “native” and the “colonizer,” but moreover “to justify, confirm,

and distinguish legitimate native violence from illegitimate colonial violence.”330 Fanon, to a

greater extent than Sartre, posited anticolonial violence as a means to erase colonial

identity. In Fanon’s view, decolonization could create “a tabula rasa of human identity in

Algeria,”331 due to the notion that, “at the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing

force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction;

it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.”332

Fanon’s nihilistic recourse to violence, like Sartre’s negative historical

determinism, were deeply problematic for Bourdieu, who believed both philosophers to

                                                                                                               327 Ibid. 328 Ibid. 329 Ibid. 330 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 243. 331 Ibid. 332 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1963), 94, quoted in Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 243.

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be “complicit” in “turning a blind eye to Algerian intellectuals’ ignorance of their own

society. 333 For reasons directly rooted in colonial history, Bourdieu observed, the

Algerian intelligentsia inadequately understood “the causes, consequences of, and, thus,

solutions for their own socio-political problems.”334 Consequently, as he argued in 1962,

the majority of Algerians also relied on a flawed understanding of the colonial situation:

Everyday experience is lived as the result of a sort of systematic plan

conceived by a malign will. The colonial system is seen as a hidden wicked

god who, according to time and circumstances, is embodied in ‘The

Europeans,’ ‘The Spaniards,’ ‘France,’ ‘The Administration,’ ‘The

Government,’ ‘They,’ ‘Them,’ ‘The Others.’335

The shared opposition of the Algerian people to an amorphous French “Other”

appeared, to Bourdieu, an immature and inaccurate understanding the colonial situation,

which had the unfortunate consequences of obscuring the reality of the revolution for

those engaged in it.336

Ethnographic Contr ibut ions

Bourdieu faulted theorists such as Fanon for failing to account for “the

specificity of Algerian nationalism and Algerian culture” within his own theories, which

                                                                                                               333 Bourdieu, “Entre amis,” n.p. “Parmi les effets funestes de la colonisation, on peut citer la complicité de certains intellectuels français de gauche à l’égard des intellectuels algériens, complicité qui les incitait à fermer les yeux sur l’ignorance dans laquelle se trouvaient ces derniers vis-à-vis de leur propre société. Je pense en particulier à Sartre, à Fanon...Cette complicité a eu des effets très graves quand ces intellectuels sont arrivés au pouvoir après l’indépendance de leur pays, et ont manifesté leur incompétence” (ibid.). 334 Ibid.; Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 50. 335 Bourdieu, “De la guerre révolutionnaire à la révolution” (1962) quoted in Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 51. 336 Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 50; Bourdieu, “Entre amis,” n.p.

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had a demonstrable influence on the Algerians’ self-conception.337 As he saw it, Fanon

used brash revolutionary rhetoric to elaborate a postcolonial fiction, according to which

men and women in independent Algeria would be “free from an oppressive

traditionalism, even an Islamic traditionalism.”338 Moreover, Fanon’s understanding of

“Algerian identity and the revolution was dangerous and naïve because it remained

‘speculative’ and celebratory in nature.”339

The greatest divergence between Fanon and Bourdieu, however, had to do with

“the relationship between theory and practice.”340 As an academic sociologist at the

outset of his career, Bourdieu took issue with what he saw as Fanon’s attempt to pass off

“revolutionary speculation” as objective sociological analysis.341 He likewise recognized

the disjuncture between Sartre’s vision of the Algerian peasantry as a “proletarianized”

and “uprooted” revolutionary force, and the empirical reality of a population

“overwhelmed by the war, by the concentration camps, and by the mass deportations.”342

For Sartre and Fanon to view the Algerians otherwise was, as Bourdieu put it,

“completely idiotic,”343 and their propensity to overlook the consequences of their

theories exasperated Bourdieu.344

                                                                                                               337 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 11; Bourdieu, “Entre amis,” n.p. As Bourdieu remarks in “Entre amis,” this oversight would have “very serious effects when these intellectuals came to power after their country’s independence and revealed their incompetence” (n.p.). 338 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 252. Extending his atheism to his supposedly objective analysis, Fanon had excluded Islam from his vision of Algeria’s future in The Wretched of the Earth (ibid.). 339 Ibid.  340 Ibid. 341 Ibid. 342 Bourdieu quoted in ibid., 254. 343 Bourdieu quoted in ibid. 344 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 254.

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From his careful collection and analysis of qualitative data, Bourdieu saw that

Sartre and Fanon’s writings were incompatible with Algerian reality.345 He therefore tried

to combat Sartre and Fanon’s radical influence over Algerian leaders using the particular

“theoretical tools” with which he was disposed as a young sociologist, and treating

Algeria as “an objective fact or situation born out of and giving rise to objective

conditions.”346 Although he famously abstained from taking a side in the Algerian

conflict, Bourdieu believed his theoretical interventions to serve a definite political

purpose; defending this conviction in 1997, he stated, “An apparently abstract analysis

can contribute to the solution of the most burning political problems.”347

The ethnographic studies presented in Travail et travailleurs en Algérie, in 1963, and

Le déracinement : la crise d’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie (with Abdelmalek Sayad), in 1964,

constituted Bourdieu’s urgent response to the Third World nationalism that had taken

hold among Algeria’s leadership over the course of the war. In these texts, Bourdieu

demonstrated how “traditional socio-political structures had been torn up which

displaced peoples, between groups and families, and disrupted the symbolic systems [...]

which connected men with their universe;” moreover, he showed how the French-

Algerian War had intensified the differences between the “dominated” and the

“dominating” in colonial society, producing “humiliation, disgust, desperation, and

                                                                                                               345 Ibid. 346 Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 49; Bourdieu, “Entre amis,” n.p. “[L]es instruments théoriques dont je pouvais disposer à l’époque, c’est-à-dire ceux que fournissait la tradition culturaliste” (Bourdieu, “Entre amis,” n.p.). 347 Bourdieu, “Entre amis,” n.p. “Une analyse apparemment abstraite peut être une contribution à la solution des problèmes politiques dans ce qu’ils ont de plus brûlant” (ibid.).

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resentment.”348 In this way, Bourdieu responded with scientific precision to the political

exigencies he had observed in war-torn Algeria. Having renounced any direct role in

determining Algeria’s political fate, Bourdieu instead intended these texts “to help

Algerians make the best choices” about their country’s future.349

The Revolut ionary Quest ion

As we have seen, Bourdieu believed that “the topographical facts” about Algeria

refuted Sartre and Fanon’s “theoretical reasoning” about Algeria’s revolutionary

potential.350 As he would remark in 1997, “Algeria, as I saw it, [...] was far from the

‘revolutionary’ image that was attributed to it in the militant literature.” 351 While

Bourdieu was teaching and conducting research in Algeria, much of the “Algerian

proletariat peasantry” was living in France, and he considered Fanon’s followers within

the petite bourgeoisie and intelligentsia to “poorly understand” the events they were

witnessing.352 Instead, Bourdieu observed a stagnating sub-proletariat, “caught between a

great desire for change and a fatalistic resignation to the world [remaining] as it was,”

and therefore incapable of inciting revolution.353 “This contradiction between the sub-

proletariat as Bourdieu observed it, and the vision of a revolutionary peasantry

                                                                                                               348 Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 49-50; see Pierre Bourdieu, Travail et travailleurs en Algérie (Paris: Mouton, 1963) and Le déracinement: la crise d’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1964). 349 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 254. 350 Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 50-51. 351 Bourdieu, “Entre amis,” n.p. “L’Algérie telle que je la voyais [...] était bien loin de l’image ‘révolutionnaire’ qu’en donnait la littérature militante...” (ibid.). 352 Ibid.; Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 50. “L’Algérie [...] était faite d’une vaste paysannerie sous-prolétarisée, mais non urbanisée, d’un sous prolétariat immense et ambivalent, d’un prolétariat essentiellement installé en France, d’une petite bourgeoisie peu au fait des réalités profondes de la société et d’une intelligentsia dont la particularité était de ne rien comprendre aux choses ambiguës et complexes” (Bourdieu, “Entre amis,” n.p.). 353 Bourdieu, “Entre amis,” n.p. [J]’observai que le sous-prolétariat oscillait entre une grande volonté de changement, et une résignation fataliste au monde tel qu’il est” (ibid.).

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elaborated by an influential group of intellectuals, seemed “extremely important,”

Bourdieu later avowed, “for it led [him] to a more reserved vision of the contemporary

leaders’ dreams of revolution.” 354 “[The Algerian peasantry] was revolutionary,”

Bourdieu remarked, “but at the same time they wanted to maintain the traditional

structures that protected them against the unknown.”355

In light of this critique, it is interesting to consider that Bourdieu employed the

term “revolution”

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assembled; “Bourdieu saw this as the only way to prevent the force of revolution being

lost in the revolution and instead of turning itself into a true revolutionary force.”360

In Bourdieu’s analysis, “the revolutionary radicalism of the Algerian rebel is a

direct consequence of their conscious awareness that the colonial society constitutes a

system.”361 While maintaining his distance from the revolutionaries, Bourdieu recognized

that the extremism of the Algerian radicals was “in perfect conformity with the logic of

the colonial situation,”362 which was ultimately an “all-or-nothing” situation.363 Because

colonial society constituted a system, Bourdieu explained, it could “not be only half-

destroyed.”364 “Only a revolution,” Bourdieu argued, and the radicals understood, “can

abolish a colonial system.”365

Aron’s “Real i s t i c” Liberal i sm

“The Revolution within the Revolution” was republished in the English edition

of Sociologie de l’Algérie (The Algerians) in 1962, with a preface by Raymond Aron, the anti-

Hegelian and anti-Marxist iconoclast who, like Bourdieu, believed that “the ideological

Marxism that had taken over the French intelligentsia [...] was based more on historical

‘optimism’ than on historical materialism.”366 Due to Aron’s reputation as an established

philosopher, his presence on the first pages of Bourdieu’s work served to legitimate the

latter’s political and intellectual position, making clear his decision not to follow Sartre

and Fanon. Moreover, Aron’s preface established a public affiliation between himself

                                                                                                               360 Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 51. 361 Bourdieu, “Revolution Within the Revolution,” 148. 362 Ibid., 150. 363 Ibid., 146. 364 Ibid., 148. 365 Ibid., 146. 366 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 133; Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 63.

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and Bourdieu as figures aligned with regard to Algeria—if not explicitly in agreement on

Algerian independence, then at least in contradistinction to Sartre’s problematic

understanding of the conflict.

Aron acknowledged that Bourdieu’s book “concerns itself with Algeria”—a

subject, he noted, that Bourdieu was able “to observe with detachment and to

understand with sympathy”—“and not with the war in Algeria.”367 Nevertheless, he used

his preface to the volume as an occasion to comment on the war, arguing specifically for

an objective assessment of the toll that it had taken on France:368

For almost eight years the drama of Algeria weighed upon the French

like an obsession, a guilt, and also like a duty. It precipitated the fall of a

regime, split a nation asunder. It imperiled domestic peace and spread

throughout the mother country a climate of passion and crime. It could

no longer be considered a simple episode in a historically irresistible

movement called “decolonization;” it became a tragic moment in the

history of France.369

Aron, like Bourdieu, located in Bourdieu’s work the “data necessary for reflection and

judgment;” however, for Aron, the primary audience for this analysis was those who

were deeply concerned with “the destiny of France.”370 Aron’s preface thus situated

Bourdieu’s work within the domain of scientific objectivity, while also demonstrating its

importance for informing explicitly political arguments.

Aron first elaborated his position in favor of Algerian independence in 1957, in

the book The Algerian Tragedy, in which he took the Algerian question head-on, with

                                                                                                               367 Raymond Aron, preface to Bourdieu, The Algerians, v. 368 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 249. 369 Aron, preface to Bourdieu, The Algerians, v.

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striking frankness and pessimism.371 At this juncture in the conflict, Aron argued, the

Algerian question was “a matter of choosing between two evils”: cohabitation and

independence.372 Cohabitation, he argued, would require pacifying the rebellion, which

would “morally, politically, and financially bankrupt France.”373 Thus, “acquiescing to

Algerian independence” seemed the only option for putting a stop to the violence and

for keeping open the possibility of a federal system in Algeria.374

In The Invention of Decolonization, Todd Shepard suggests that although Sartre and

Aron are typically—and justifiably—depicted as “intellectual and political adversaries,”

there were important similarities between their “shared, early, and clairvoyant opposition

to French Algeria.”375 For example, Aron’s anti-republicanism, a trait he shared with

Sartre, “allowed [him] to articulate clearly [his] understanding that French people and

Algerian people were different,” a conviction for which he found ample support in

Bourdieu’s work.376 Through his exposure to Bourdieu’s ethnographic writing, which he

took to affirm the impossibility of French-Algerian reconciliation, Aron had come to

recognize this “radical incompatibility” of French and Algerian culture.377 As he saw it,

the fundamental and often-overlooked distinctions between the “French and modern”

culture of the colons and the “traditional culture” of the diverse Algerian population—

which Bourdieu had meticulously depicted in The Algerians—were at the root of this

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           370 Ibid. 371 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 135. 372 Raymond Aron, La Tragédie Algérienne (Paris: Plon, 1957), 69; cited in Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 139. 373 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 132; ibid., 139. 374 Ibid., 139. 375 Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 63. 376 Ibid. 377 Aron, preface to Bourdieu, The Algerians, vi.

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irreconcilable difference.378 Thus, for Aron, the fact that the Algerians and French were

different meant that France should stop trying to make the Algerians French through an

assimilationist project rooted in the ideals of the French imperial nation-state.379

Having decided, Shepard argues, “that French republicanism was ideologically

exhausted, Aron proposed liberalism as an alternative.” 380 The particular breed of

liberalism that Aron proposed reflected the fact that he, like Bourdieu, was not

compelled by Hegelianism, and moreover was acutely aware of the detrimental effects of

Fanon and Sartre’s existential Marxist theories on Algerian society. Thus, although he

identified himself as a liberal,381 Aron criticized the adherence of the French left, in

general, to a “Marxist/Hegelian notion of history that ‘teaches violence and

fanaticism.’”382 In contrast to Sartre’s revolutionary radicalism, Aron preferred a “realistic”

liberalism that did not partake of tiers mondisme’s critique of France and the West, but

rather based its support for Algerian independence “on an economic conception of

French national interest.”383

Even before his turn against reconciliation, Aron had been critical of intellectuals’

engagement in revolutionary politics. As the progenitor of the intellectual trope of the

“committed observer,” he argued in his 1955 book, The Opium of the Intellectuals, that

“French and Third World nationalists were being led astray by Marxist revolutionary

                                                                                                               378 Ibid., v. 379 Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 71. See also Gary Wilder, French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 380 Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 70-71. 381 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 132. 382 Raymond Aron quoted in ibid. 383 Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 68.

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mythology.” 384 In Opium, Aron argued that throughout the twentieth century,

intellectuals had become the forerunners of revolutionary ideology; consequently, Aron

believed, recent revolutions “have not been proletarian revolutions; they have been

thought up and carried out by intellectuals.”385 This led to the paradox, which Le Sueur

reformulates, that “as intellectuals became more important in directing revolutions, they

lost universality.”386 By undercutting French intellectuals’ pretentions to universalism, a

cornerstone of French intellectual legitimacy since the Enlightenment, Aron’s critique

proved deeply troubling for many on the French left.387

Bourdieu’s intellectual and political stances with regard to the Algerian

Revolution exhibit important similarities with Aron’s model of the “committed observer.”

Recognizing the moral and political complexity of the situation in Algeria, but feeling

sincere solidarity with the Algerian people, Bourdieu chose to contribute to the

resolution of the conflict in the capacity of an objective researcher—by clarifying the

objective structures at play, and the ways of life at stake, in the move toward Algerian

independence. To help all parties involved to make the best decisions, Bourdieu believed,

was the most responsible mode of engagement.

“The Revolution Within the Revolution” illustrates what Bourdieu later

described as his “civic” commitment to Algeria, and thus to the revolution that the

Algerian people desired.388 In it, Bourdieu expresses his hope that, moving forward,

Algeria’s “revolutionized” society would be able to devise “revolutionary solutions to

                                                                                                               384 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 132. 385 Aron, Opium of the Intellectuals, 312. 386 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 132. 387 Ibid., 133 388 Bourdieu, “Entre amis,” n.p.

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meet its problems.”389 To do so was “not only in the interests of one social class,” he

argued—in fact, “the whole economic and social situation [mandated] the adoption of a

revolutionary policy.”390 In the future, Bourdieu wrote,

[Algerian society] will insist that a way be found to mobilize these masses

who have been freed from the traditional disciplines and thrown into a

chaotic, disillusioned world, by holding up before them a collective ideal, the

building of a harmonious social order and the development of a modern

economy capable of assuring employment and a decent standard of living for

all.391

Writing in 1961, Bourdieu recognized the danger that lay at the threshold of Algerian

independence, and this recognition prompted him to put forth a cautiously optimistic

political proposition: “Algeria contains such explosive forces,” Bourdieu wrote, “that it

could well be that there now remains only a choice between chaos and an original form

of socialism that will have been carefully designed to meet the needs of the actual

situation.”392

Derrida’s Silence

Like Bourdieu, Derrida looked to the previous generation of philosophers to

provide an alternative to Sartre’s Hegelian Marxism, the violence and dogmatism of

which repelled him much as it had Bourdieu. Yet while Bourdieu was ambivalent about

revolutionary politics, we have seen how he proffered scientific analyses of the Algerian

situation in hopes of helping the French and Algerian people to developed informed

                                                                                                               389 Bourdieu, “Revolution Within the Revolution,” 192. 390 Ibid., 191. 391 Ibid., 192. 392 Ibid.

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opinions—in contrast, Derrida remained silent about Algeria throughout the war and

much of his career, with few but noteworthy exceptions. Derrida’s absence from the

debates of the 1950s and early 1960s, far from signaling detachment or indifference to

Algeria’s plight, should be understood in relation to his personal investment in the

conflict.

In the previous chapter, Derrida’s reflections on his childhood in Algeria

illustrated how his expulsion from the Algerian French community influenced his

conceptions of self, identity, and culture, and in fact intensified his desire for integration

within the French Algerian community; however, as Edward Baring reminds us,

Derrida’s desire to belong as French “did not entail a wholesale support of colonial

politics.”393 In an intellectual atmosphere laden with the lessons of the Dreyfus Affair,

young Algerian pupils such as Derrida felt pressure to make their political convictions

manifest. Thus, even as a student in Algeria, Derrida was sympathetic to the need for

colonial reform, and he engaged in early activism with the encouragement of Jean

Czarnecki, his philosophy teacher in the late 1940s, who went on to endorse the Manifeste

des 121.394 As he recalled in a 1998 interview, Derrida began to join “leftist Algerian

groups” in the late 1940s, while still attending Hypokhâgne at the Lycée Bugeaud in Algiers:

“I belonged to groups that took a stance, I was politically aware,” he said. “Without

being for Algerian independence, I was against the harsh politics of France. We fought

for a decolonization by the transformation of special statutes for Algerians.”395

                                                                                                               393 Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 247. 394 Ibid., 247. 395 Jacques Derrida interviewed in Aziz Chouaki, L’Étoile d’Alger (Alger: Marsa, 1998), 130, quoted in Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 108.

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As a student at the ENS, Derrida’s political stance, like Bourdieu’s, was colored

by his skepticism of the Communist Party—a skepticism that Edward Baring considers,

in Derrida’s case, to be a product of his Algerian background—but also the anti-

Hegelian milieu in which his philosophical thinking took shape.396 Moreover, Derrida’s

Algerian origins implicated him in the conflict in a different way from his metropolitan

peers. The colony’s desire for independence was a sensitive subject in Paris, as it had

been in Algeria. Derrida thus found himself unable to discuss his opinions with his

family or acquaintances in Algeria, and he knew only one person in Paris—his good

friend and ENS peer Lucien Bianco—who shared his perspective on the conflict.397

In a rare and unpublished essay from 1952, which Edward Baring analyzes in his

article, “Liberalism and the Algerian War: The Case of Jacques Derrida,” the twenty-one-

year-old Derrida articulated his position on the conflict. In this essay, Derrida positions

himself as “avowedly a pied-noir and thus French,” yet aligns his opinions on Algerian

politics with those of the French Algerian liberals, a group that acknowledged Algeria’s

desire for autonomy but nonetheless opposed Algerian independence. 398 The essay

illustrates how Derrida, “like the French Algerian liberals of the same period, argued for

the expansion of political rights to all Algerians, but [an expansion that] would be

understood within the framework of French or French Algerian tutelage.”399 Baring thus

identifies a characteristic indeterminacy in Derrida’s analysis of the conflict, which, it is

important to remember, was written before Algerian independence became a plausible

option. Baring writes, “Although this essay […] was written before any of the moves to

                                                                                                               396 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 108. For the decline of Hegel in 1950s France, see Michael Roth, Knowing and History, 74-76; ibid., 190. 397 Peeters, Derrida, 99. 398 Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 248-249.  

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independence, the language used and ideas expressed challenge any simple depiction of

Derrida as either a colonial subject or a fervent anticolonial campaigner.”400

Thus, although Derrida abstained from public debate on the question of Algerian

independence, his silence does not preclude—it in fact necessitates—an analysis of his

political position. Baring undertakes just such an analysis within his article, in which he

concludes that the French-Algerian war constituted a formative moment in the history of

deconstructive thought. He writes,

Torn between a colonial power towards which he felt grave misgivings

and a French republican tradition to which he expressed a strong

allegiance, Derrida was confronted with questions as to the univocity of

identity and the structural limitations of critique—themes that would

preoccupy him in his more theoretical writings. Derrida first developed

deconstructive ideas during this period, from the tortured political stance

of a French Algerian liberal.”401

For the young Derrida, the French-Algerian war was a deeply personal historical event

that confronted him with questions about reason, culture, race, universalism, and the

metaphysical primacy of the Western subject, themes which came to occupy a central

place in deconstructive thought. 402 Derrida, moreover, explicitly acknowledged this

formative influence when he claimed that the French-Algerian War was “one of the

historical contexts that most immediately informed his thinking.”403

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           399 Ibid., 248. 400 Ibid. 401 Ibid., 241. 402 Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 5; see also Derrida and Bennington, Jacques Derrida, and Lee Morrissey, “Derrida, Algeria, and ‘Structure, Sign, and Play,’” Postmodern Culture 9, no. 2 (1999). 403 Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 5.

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The French Alger ian Liberal Pos i t ion

Although Derrida long opposed colonialism in principle, he would struggle to

reconcile this mission with his personal interest in Franco-Algerian cooperation and

cohabitation, misgivings about the future of an independent Algeria, and fundamental

opposition to violence as a revolutionary strategy—theoretical (as in Sartre and Fanon’s

writings) or physical (as practiced by the FLN). Derrida elaborated his stance in an

impassioned private exchange with the young historian Pierre Nora, in which Derrida’

most specific commentary on contemporary Algerian affairs can be found.

In 1961, upon his return from Algeria where he taught from 1958 to 1960, Nora

published a scathing analysis of the French Algerians, Les Français d’Algérie.404 Nora’s

critique, published at the height of the war, served as a blanket indictment of “all but the

most militant French Algerian supporters of the Front de Libération Nationale

(FLN).” 405 Barely distinguishing between moderate critics of colonialism and the

staunchest supporters of French Algeria, Nora interpreted the French Algerian liberals, a

broad category composed of “the large minority of non-Communist French Algerian

critics of the colonial government”406 and maligned by Algerian nationalists and French

communists alike,407 as un-redeemably complicit in the French colonial project.408

Despite the heterogeneity of the category, the French Algerian liberals generally

“were united by their resistance to a colonial system that placed severe restrictions on the

                                                                                                               404 Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 239. 405 Ibid., 240.  406 Ibid., 242. 407 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 108. 408 See Pierre Nora, Les français d’Algérie (Paris: Éditions Julliard, 1961); Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 240.  

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individual rights of French colonial subjects.” 409 Moreover, as Baring notes, by 1961

“many self-professed French Algerian liberals had come to support independence.”410 It

is therefore striking that Nora levied such unequivocal criticism against the French

Algerian liberals, arguing that the liberal position and a support of Algerian

independence were constitutively opposed, because—as he saw it—to support Algerian

independence would be to turn “their liberalism against its very source.”411

As Nora later explained in an interview with Baring, he intended his book as a

“surgical” operation that “would ‘cleanly cut’ the Français d’Algérie from France.”412 As

Baring explains, Nora’s indictment of the French Algerians was twofold: first, in a move

that harkens back to the previous chapter’s exploration of Derrida’s national identity,

Nora refused to accept French Algerians as properly French;413 second, he blamed the

French Algerians for the abuses of French colonialism, and attempted to pass off the

involvement of the metropolitan French in colonial abuses as mere complicity with the

French Algerians’ corruption.414

In a private letter dated April 27, 1961, Derrida articulated his rejoinder to Nora’s

argument.415 Baring reads Derrida’s response as not only a defense of the French

Algerian liberals, but as an avowal of personal solidarity with this stance. In it, Derrida

provides a broader and more nuanced definition of French Algerian liberalism, intended

                                                                                                               409 Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 242. 410 Ibid., 240. 411 Nora, Les Français d’Algérie, in Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 240. 412 Pierre Nora, interview by Edward Baring, quoted in Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 249. 413 Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 249.  414 Ibid., 250. 415 Jacques Derrida, letter to Pierre Nora, 27 April 1961, fol. 27.6, IMEC, Caen, cited in Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 240.

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to distinguish the French Algerian liberals from fervent supporters of colonialism while

also eliding the “catch-22” that Nora had put in place to render an adherence to French

liberal ideals and a support for Algerian independence mutually exclusive.416 In fact, as

Baring suggests, “it was because Derrida agreed with Nora’s political platform, and

especially the question of Algerian independence, that his defense of the liberal position

was so insistent.”417

Positioning himself so as to critique French imperialism in the name of the liberal

values of the French republic, Derrida aimed to extricate French values from French

nationalism and to use these in his critique of French hegemony.418 In so doing, he

defied the limits that Nora had attempted to set on French liberal opposition:

Charting the developing views of liberals in and outside of Algeria,

Derrida argued that it was possible to turn French ideals against French

rule. But his opposition to French sovereignty in Algeria did not entail

support of what he saw as closed Algerian nationalism. For Derrida, one

should not resist French sovereignty by directly rejecting France,

instituting another nationalist regime; he rather hoped for a Franco-

Muslim community that would maintain a robust connection to

France.419

Derrida did not respond directly to Nora’s challenge of the French Algerians’ Frenchness,

but neither did he hesitate to assert French Algerians’ “factual belonging to France (as

culture, etc.)” and “not as a sovereign and colonial power.”420 For Derrida, there was no

                                                                                                               416 Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 241. 417 Ibid., 242. 418 Ibid., 241. 419 Ibid. 420 Derrida, letter to Pierre Nora, quoted in Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 250.

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contradiction between the French Algerians’ identification as French and a liberal

position that favored Algerian sovereignty; instead, as Baring writes, “to be liberal was to

hold the French government up to the standards of its republican tradition,” and

therefore “the tension between belonging to France and the critique of French

colonialism was constitutive of the liberal political stance.”421

Insofar as the French Algerian liberal position judged French colonialism

unfavorably against French republican standards, it may have made Derrida sympathetic

to the social aims of the French communists with regard to Algeria; on matters of

ideology, however, the liberal position demonstrates “a significant divergence” from that

of the communists.”422 The French Algerian liberals, situated physically or at least

psychologically within the colony, were more sensitive than their European counterparts

to the rise of Algerian nationalism, a “recognition [that] placed [them] ‘à contre-courant’

to the ‘European’ community of which they were a part.”423 This wariness of Algerian

nationalism, a product of the French Algerian liberals’ social experience, explains much

about this divergence.

The most prominent figure to have attempted to publicly uphold the French

Algerian liberal position—and whom Derrida very much resembled in his early

insistence on measures that would allow for the “political and social development” of

the non-European population in Algeria, tempered by skepticism about Algerian

independence—was the Algerian-born philosopher Albert Camus.424 Camus had served

as Derrida’s earliest inspiration to study philosophy, and Derrida’s affinity with French

                                                                                                               421 Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 250. 422 Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 108. 423 Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 242.

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Algerian liberalism is plausibly explained by his attraction to Camus—a personal and

philosophical rival of Sartre—as an alternative to Sartre and Fanon’s “status quo.”425

Much as Aron had done for Bourdieu, Camus provided Derrida with an anti-Hegelian

and anti-Marxist reference who, like Aron, he did not escape the criticism of a French

left that increasingly favored Algerian independence.426

The Case o f Camus

As a “pied noir” who received intense scrutiny for his measured opposition to

Algerian independence, Camus was fully aware that his was an unpopular—and perhaps

untenable—position, on which he largely kept silent “out of fear that [it] would only

provoke more violence against French settlers” in Algeria (such as his mother, a resident

of Oran).427 Indeed, Camus’ aversion to violence, inspired in large part by his personal

investment in the settlers’ safety, was the strongest characteristic of his position, and in a

rare 1956 statement he asserted his exclusive support for measures that would prevent

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           424 Ibid., 244; Baring, Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 108. 425 Peeters, Derrida, 99; Derrida Bennington, Jacques Derrida, 328. Camus’s reputation played a significant role in setting Derrida on the path to study philosophy. As Bennington explains, in June 1948, after passing the baccalauréat, Derrida came across an Algerian radio broadcast on the topic of career orientation, in which a hypokhâgne professor of literature praised this system of secondary education and the diversity of disciplines that allowed students to postpone selecting an area of specialization. The professor also mentioned that Camus had been one of his students within the hypokhâgne system. This discovery prompted Derrida, who at this point had never even heard of the ENS, to enroll the next day in the Upper Literature of the class at the Lycée Bugeaud, which would serve as the launching pad for his eventual admission to the ENS (Derrida and Bennington, Jacques Derrida, 328).  426 For Camus’ anti-Hegelianism, see Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 58. As early as 1946, Camus accused existentialism “of assuming Hegel’s greatest error, ‘which consists in reducing man to history. He believed that Sartre had contradicted his own basic principle [of human freedom], because humans absorbed completely into history have lost all freedom” (Camus quoted in ibid.). For Camus’ anti-Marxism, see also Aronson, 84; ibid., 119. 427 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 5.

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unnecessary bloodshed in Algeria.428 Camus’ was not, however, a one-sided defense of

the French settlers; in fact, as Baring explains, since before World War II Camus had

“demanded social reform that would improve living conditions for Arab communities in

Algeria, highlighting inequalities in their access to education and the injustices of a two-

tier political system that treated the vast majority of non-Europeans as subjects rather

than citizens.”429

As Baring notes, Camus’ demands and proposals for improving conditions for

Algeria’s Arabs went largely unheeded, and “as the continuing violence after the start of

the war in November 1954 forced the [Arab and European] communities even farther

apart, his refusal to choose one side over the other seemed to unmask him as a supporter

of colonial oppression.”430 Moreover, because violence against Algerians produced many

more casualties than FLN violence did at this time, Camus’ vociferous condemnation of

terrorism seemed “shockingly disproportionate” compared to his modest participation in

protests against torture. 431 The suspicions of Algerian indépendantistes and the

metropolitan left had harbored about Camus’ allegiances appeared finally to be

confirmed when, in December 1957, as the violence in Algeria was escalating, Camus

famously proclaimed: “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.”432

Camus’ 1957 statement provoked a scandal on the French left—which by this point

was on its way to supporting Algerian independence over reconciliation—and it caused

                                                                                                               428 Camus quoted in Peeters, Derrida, 99. “Personnellement, je ne m’intéresse plus qu’aux actions qui peuvent, ici et maintenant, épargner du sang inutile” (ibid.). 429 Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 243. 430 Ibid., 243-244; see also Benjamin Stora, Histoire de la Guerre d’Algérie (1954-1962) (Paris: La Découverte, 2004). 431 Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 244.

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many, including the Algerian writer Albert Memmi, to view Camus as a “colonizer of

good will.” 433 Recent intellectual histories, however, have offered more generous

interpretations of Camus’ pronouncement and its implications for the intellectual’s

involvement in politics. 434 Jean-François Sirinelli, for example, interprets Camus’

invocation of his mother not as an abdication of responsibility for the violence occurring

in Algeria, but rather as an intellectually courageous admission of his profound

uncertainty and distress.435 For Camus, the French-Algerian War forced the question of

whether “a nuanced definition of a legitimate intellectual” was possible; as Le Sueur

writes, “In an age of extremes, this was no simple question.”436 Sirinelli similarly takes

Camus’ actions to represent the difficulties faced by intellectuals, not necessarily in

choosing sides, but in endorsing unequivocally the actions of those they support.437 The

prevalence of terrorism and torture throughout the French-Algerian War intensified this

quagmire, confronting intellectuals on both sides with the difficulty of reconciling their

political allegiances with the knowledge of the excessive violence committed by all

parties in the conflict.438

Thus, despite his firm belief in the need for “greater political and economic

equality” in Algeria, Camus’ commitment to the French community in Algeria caused

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           432 Sartre quoted in Rioux and Sirinelli, Guerre d’Algérie, 12-13. “Je crois à la justice, mais je défendrai ma mère avant la justice” (ibid.). 433 Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 244, quoting from Aronson, Camus and Sartre, 210-211. 434 See Le Sueur, “The Unbearable Solitude of Being: The Question of Albert Camus,” in Uncivil War, 87-127; see also Sirinelli, “Les intellectuels français en guerre d’Algérie,” in Rioux and Sirinelli, La Guerre d’Algérie et les Intellectuels Français, 11-32. 435 Rioux and Sirinelli, Guerre d’Algérie, 13. 436 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 5. 437 Rioux and Sirinelli, Guerre d’Algérie, 13. “L’aversion pour le terrorisme et pour la violence à l’égard des civils rendra souvent l’engagement difficile ou réticent en faveur de l’un ou l’autre des deux camps d’un conflit qui ira en se radicalisant” (ibid.).

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him to remain opposed to Algerian independence; for him, “the French Algerians were

inhabitants of Algeria as legitimate as any other, and he believed that independence

would be inimical to their interests.”439 Camus’ ultimate wish was instead to foster, as

Baring writes, “a Franco-Muslim community in which cultural differences would be

accepted within the framework of political equality, guaranteed by French

sovereignty.”440 To this end, he—in direct alignment with Derrida’s proposals in his 1952

essay—intended for Algeria “to remain part of France,” but “a France that would have

rejected its colonial past.”441

Camus justified the paternalism implicit in this stance by warning that the

violence and misguided Hegelian Marxism of the Algerian nationalists would have

disastrous consequences if Algeria were to gain independence. For Le Sueur, Camus’

analysis seems nothing short of prophetic in light of the events of the Black Decade; in

many ways, Camus seems accurately to have predicted the crisis that would eventually

result from the FLN’s adherence to the Sartre-Fanon line.442 In Le Sueur’s analysis,

Camus had condemned the FLN because it used violence even against its

own people to achieve its power and because it refused to share power

after independence. Even if he had questionable motives for rejecting

Algerian nationalism, the fact remains that his predictions about Algeria

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           438 Ibid. 439 Camus quoted in Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 243. 440 Ibid. 441 Ibid. To this end, Camus controversially endorsed a 1958 plan, devised by Algerian law professor Marc Lauriol, to establish a federal system in which Algeria would obtain partial independence while still remaining part of France (ibid.). 442 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 127.

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came true: the Algerian government would never be able to free itself

from the violence at its totalitarian foundation.443

It is therefore understandable, Le Sueur argues, that French and Algerian intellectuals

alike should have recourse to Camus in their attempts to comprehend and respond to

the phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism that arose from the instability of Algeria’s

violent and antidemocratic postcolonial government.

Indeed, Camus’ cautious evaluation of the dangers faced by French and Arab

Algerians may have resonated with Derrida precisely because the French Algerian liberals

foresaw the disastrous impact of a Hegelian dialectic used to foster intolerance and

violence between French and Algerians. As an established philosopher weighing in on

the events of the 1990s, in which many of Camus’ predictions came to disastrous fruition,

Derrida looked to yet another French intellectual for a new way of conceiving of French-

Algerian relations—one that would justify and render possible the peaceful cohabitation

of these two groups within Algeria.

The Hospi ta l i ty o f the Other

In opposition to the many intellectuals of the left who, by the turn of the 1960s,

had become convinced that a radical—and often violent—breaking of ties between the

French and Algerians was necessary, Louis Massignon, a professor at the École des

Hautes Études and a member of the Collège de France, articulated an alternative vision

of Franco-Algerian relations that left open the possibility of reconciliation.444 Massignon,

a convert to Roman Catholicism and one of the foremost Islamic scholars of his

                                                                                                               443  Ibid.

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generation, spent the years leading up to his death in 1962, at age seventy-nine, engaged

in an intense campaign against the French-Algerian War and in defense of poor Muslims

living in France.445 Massignon was a passionate and committed intellectual who, as Cleo

Kearns explains, “brought the full weight of his passion not only to his scholarly work

but to life in the public domain, where he campaigned vigorously for an honorable policy

toward the Arabic world and for the rights of Muslims in France.”446

Massignon provided Derrida with “a remarkable, perhaps unique example of the

fully engaged, fully committed scholar” who was “actively committed to his discipline

and equally committed to the social and political practices it seemed to him to require,”

but also capable of sensitive and critical self-reflection with regard to the implications of

his discourse.447 Massignon’s utmost political and philosophical concern was for the

“appreciation of the full humanity of all parties in a dispute,” and in his later years he

modeled his political activism explicitly after Ghandi’s philosophy of nonviolence.448

During the French-Algerian War, Massignon acted on these commitments as a member

of the Comité chrétien d’entente France Islam, founded in 1955,449 and as a vice president of

the Comité France-Maghreb, which was founded in 1953 with the aims of providing

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           444 Cleo McNelly Kearns, “Mary, Maternity, and Abrahamic Hospitality in Derrida’s Reading of Massignon,” in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, ed. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (New York: Routledge, 2005), 81; Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 222. 445 Kearns, “Derrida’s Reading of Massignon,” 81. For a full biography of Massignon, see Mary Louise Gide, Louis Massignon: The Crucible of Compassion (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996). 446 Ibid. 447 Ibid. 448 Ibid. 449 Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, 317.

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“objective information” about the conflict and fighting for the defense and

“indiscriminate application” of human rights.450

Aside from his direct political interventions, which may well have provided a

model for Derrida’s participation with the Comité International de Soutien aux

Intellectuels Algériens, Massignon’s theoretical understanding of hospitality and its

implications for French-Algerian relations had a significant influence on Derrida’s late

writings on the religious mandate of hospitality and, by extension, on the CISIA’s civil

campaign to reform the right of political asylum in France. In this way, Massignon set a

philosophical precedent for the approach to religion and to Franco-Algerian relations

that Derrida would adopt in the 1990s and 2000s, both in his philosophical seminars on

politics, religion, cosmopolitanism, and friendship, and in his political response to the

Black Decade, as a member of the CISIA.

Drawing on the theological and mystical resources of the Abrahamic religions,

Massignon made the concept of hospitality a cornerstone of his thinking about the

relations between the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 451

Massignon recognized hospitality as an especially important value within the Abrahamic

religions—“Abraham of Genesis,” Kearns reminds us, “is legendary for his welcome,

even to angels unawares”452—because it was essential for fostering cooperation and

tolerance among them. Because of their shared “Semitic or religious heritage,” 453

                                                                                                               450 Ibid., 321. 451 See Kearns, “Derrida’s Reading of Massignon.” 452 Kearns, “Derrida’s Reading of Massignon, 81. 453 See Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 223-224; Massignon and Berque’s debate published as “Dialogue sur ‘Les Arabes’: Par Jacques Berque et Louis Massignon,” Esprit 288 (1960): 1505-1519. Berque identifies Massignon’s concern for a “shared Semitic or religious heritage,” saying, “Je suis par rapport à vous en tension... Je cherche une communauté

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Massignon believed, France had a responsibility to contribute to the development of the

Arab world with “the greatest fraternal respect,”454 and to place “friendship” with the

Arab people above all other political, religious, or cultural concerns.455

Massignon brought the concept of hospitality to bear on the question of French-

Algerian relations in a debate published in the October 1960 edition of Esprit. In a piece

entitled “Dialogue sur ‘Les Arabes,’” Massignon and his colleague at the Collège de

France, Jacques Berque, engaged one another on questions raised by Berque’s recent

book, Les Arabes d’hier à demain.456 At the center of the debate between Massignon and

Berque was the question of identity and its relationship to violence, Berque’s dialectical

understanding of which Massignon contested.457 In anti-Hegelian fashion, Massignon

framed his advocacy for French-Algerian reconciliation in non-dialectical terms, arguing

for the recognition of the Other as such, which would in turn allow for a social unity

founded in difference.458 For Massignon, above all, Algerian identity ought not to be

understood in terms of “a violent, dialectical confrontation of the Algerian with the

world and with history;” instead, violence stood in the way of peaceful coexistence

between Algerian Arabs and non-Arabs.459

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           avec les Arabes non pas tellement dans ce témoignage sémitique dont vous venez de nous parler, mais dans un message gréco-oriental” (ibid., 1518). 454 Massignon and Berque, “Dialogue sur ‘Les Arabes,’” 1519. “Je crois qu’actuellement la France a le devoir de se pencher sur le problème arabe avec le plus grand respect fraternel...” 455 Ibid., 1513. “L’homme a besoin d’amitié ; il a besoin au minimum d’amitié et si nous avons l’amitié avec les Arabes, si nous la leur proposons, toutes les autres objections tombent.” 456 Berque’s book was translated into English as The Arabs: Their History and Future (London: Faber and Faber, 1964). 457 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 222. 458 See Massignon and Berque, “Dialogue sur ‘Les Arabes.’” 459 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 223.

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Using phenomenological terminology, Massignon evoked the concept of

“hospitality,” or “existing-for-Others,” as allowing for the “mutual comprehension of

Otherness” that would make reconciliation possible. 460 Massignon cited three

fundamental principles of Arab culture: the Abrahamic tradition, the spoken word, and

the right of asylum.461 These, he argued, were universal values of which French culture

had lost sight, and which affirmed the need for a respectful understanding between the

two peoples. Moreover, he argued, because the right of asylum was sacred to Arab

culture, it was wrong to argue that the Algerians “were incapable of offering hospitality

to the French colons.”462

To Massignon’s disappointment, the reconciliation he desired proved impossible;

in March 1962 Algeria formally gained independence from France, through a separation

that entailed excessive and enduring violence.463 Derrida responded to Algerian liberation

with the brief but intense hope that his parents would be able to remain in Algeria—a

hope he soon recognized as a manifestation of attachment and longing, rather than a

realistic assessment of the prospects faced by the Français d’Algérie in newly

independent Algeria.464 Derrida’s affective identification with Algeria thus provides a

                                                                                                               460 Ibid. 461 Massignon and Berque, “Dialogue sur ‘Les Arabes,’” 1519. “[I]l y a chez eux des valeurs uniques au point de vue humaine : le patrimoine abrahamique, la parole donnée, le droit d’asile.” 462 Ibid.; see also Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 224. “Dire qu’ils ne sont pas capables de donner l’hospitalité aux colons français, même aux colons français, alors que le droit d’asile est sacré chez eux...” (Massignon, “Dialogue sur ‘Les Arabes,’” 1519). 463 Pierre Bourdieu, forward to Le Sueur, Uncivil War, ix. 464 Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida, 330; Peeters, Derrida, 156; Stora, Algeria, 124. Although Derrida encouraged his parents to remain in Algeria after independence, they fled to France in 1962, along with 900,000 other Europeans who left Algeria between 1961 and 1962 (Stora, Algeria, 124). Of the 140,000 Jews living in Algeria before the war began in 1954, only 10,000 would remain by 1962 (Michael Laskier, North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century: The Jews of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria [New York: New York

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plausible explanation of his connection to Camus, whose difficult and problematic

statement about his mother may have resonated with Derrida for reasons that were

incomprehensible to metropolitan liberals; and to Massignon, who provided a way of

conceiving of French-Algerian relations that left open the possibility of peaceful

cohabitation and understanding between them—both in France and in Algeria.

Conclusion

We have seen how the “status quo” of existential Marxism developed by Sartre

and Fanon, while appropriated by certain intellectual groups, prompted Derrida and

Bourdieu each to follow a different path of political and philosophical development. For

Bourdieu, this meant contributing to the objective understanding of the Algerian

situation in the function of an objective researcher, who was nonetheless critical of the

utopianism and violence that revolutionary politics implied; the anti-Hegelian and anti-

Marxist Raymond Aron, while propounding forceful arguments in favor of Algerian

independence, assisted Bourdieu in legitimating the politically neutral role he had

selected for himself in opposition to Sartre’s dominant influence.

Derrida’s aversion to the Hegelian dialectic, and the anticolonial violence it

served, might also be considered as the rejection of a Self/Other distinction that

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           University Press, 1994] cited in Morrissey, “Derrida, Algeria, and ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’). An article from Le Journal d’Alger, published on June 7, 1961, testifies to Derrida’s concern about the potential for Algerian Jews, such as his parents, to remain in Algeria after the war. Derrida circled the following lines, in which a spokesperson of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic responds to the question of whether Algerian Jews will be able to choose between French and Algerian citizenship: “Despite the Crémieux Decree, we have always the considered the Jews to be native Algerians. Of course, they too will have the power to choose the statute foreigner if they desire it” (Derrida, included in correspondence with Pierre Nora [IMEC]).

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collapsed under the pressure of Derrida’s own national and cultural identifications; this,

combined with his aversion to political Marxism and personal interest in maintaining

Algeria as a culturally plural and secure environment for his own family, set him too on a

path that diverged greatly from that cleared by Sartre and Fanon. Although Camus

provided a more obvious source of support for Derrida, the framework Massignon set

forth for thinking about French-Algerian relations also held immense appeal. This

influence is evident in Derrida’s pronouncements from the Black Decade, when, faced

with Algerians’ urgent demands for political asylum, he deployed an argument similar to

that of Massignon to make the case for the liberalization of France’s immigration policies.

Both leading up to and following Algerian independence, Sartre and Fanon’s

radical theories had a profound influence over Algerian leaders,465 who focused, as Le

Sueur argues, “on negative dialectics, violence, and radical Otherness as a means of

reconstituting Algerian postcolonial identity.” 466 By doing so, the proponents of Sartre’s

and Fanon’s theories within Algeria contributed to the struggles of national

reconstitution that ensued from independence. As Le Sueur explains,

Sartre’s and Fanon’s efforts had severe, long-standing, and devastating

repercussions on the identity debates in contemporary Algeria. It is tragic

and doubly ironic that many dimensions of [the late-twentieth century’s]

Manichaean debates in Algeria over authenticity, identity, and language

were dangerously conditioned during decolonization by non-Algerian

intellectuals inspired more by fantasies of revolutionary mythology than

by realities (and problems) of hybrid colonial identity.467

                                                                                                               465 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 214-215. 466 Ibid., 214. 467 Ibid., 11.

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Bourdieu and Camus foresaw the failure of these theories in the Algerian context.

Moreover, Camus—maligned for apparently condoning French imperialism—futilely

attempted to warn against the dangerous legacy in store for the Algerian revolutionaries

who uncritically embraced Sartre and Fanon’s thinking. This is an irony that would haunt

French intellectuals and trouble the ever insecure notion of what constitutes a legitimate

political stance.468

Looking back on the events that ensued from the Algerian revolution, Bourdieu

observed that “Sartre and Fanon’s visions of revolutionary identity and Algerian society

epistemologically recolonized Algeria’s political leadership after the war.”469 Thus, as Le

Sueur explains, the social and political conflicts that Algeria endured in the latter part of

the twentieth century continued to be “influenced by a political Manichaeism and a failed

revolutionary utopian socialism:”470

Authenticity, violence, difference, and a lack of hospitality for the [non-

Arab] Other suggest that Fanon’s myth of the new man was strong

enough to persuade leaders to follow but naïve enough to lead them into

one of the most regrettable political cul-de-sacs of the twentieth

century.471

Bourdieu’s predictions thus came to fruition in the 1990s, as leaders such as Houari

Boumediene—who, like Fanon, had spent much of the war in Tunis with the FLN

intelligentsia—“grafted Sartrean and Fanonian theories of identity and belief in the

                                                                                                               468 Ibid., 254. 469 Ibid.; see also Bourdieu, “Entre amis.” 470 Ibid. 471 Ibid.

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revolutionary potential of the Algerian peasantry” onto the political programs they

wished to implement.472

This concern with radical Otherness and the notion of an authentic Algerian

identity, which Le Sueur considers “the single most important concern of

decolonization,” combined with other factors, such as a troubled economy, agricultural

problems, industrialization, and the OPEC oil crisis, to produce a disastrous situation in

postcolonial Algeria.473 These events, as we shall see in the following chapter, caused

Derrida to break a lifetime of silence by speaking openly about his terre natale, and to

bring his philosophical thought to bear on the political questions Algeria faced.474 For

Bourdieu, the crisis of the Black Decade precipitated a more hesitant return to Algeria,

from which he had since distanced himself over the course of his career. As fellow

members of the CISIA, both were charged with intervening in a crisis they seemed,

regretfully, to have foreseen.

                                                                                                               472 Ibid., 214. 473 Ibid., 214-215. 474 Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 257-258; Chachoua, “Pierre Bourdieu et l’Algérie,” n.p.

CHAPTER THREE: Black Decade, 1991-2002

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Introduction

The Black Decade confronted Derrida and Bourdieu with the destructive legacy

of the Algerian revolution, in which, as we have seen, the previous generation of French

intellectuals played a crucial role. The “theoretical damage” that ensued from debates

over the French-Algerian War greatly impeded the processes of decolonization and

nation building in independent Algeria.475 As Le Sueur describes, “After the Algerian

revolution took place, many of the FLN leaders who had taken power used the same

arguments Fanon and Sartre had made about identity, especially authenticity,” to

legitimate their power and to quell political opposition.476 Feeling solidarity with Sartre,

and even more so with Fanon, whose prophesy of postcolonial identity they believed to

have come true, Algeria’s new leaders worked “to structure [the nation] politically along

the socialist lines” Sartre and Fanon had set out.477 Only after many years, as Le Sueur

explains, would it become clear just how much harm could result from Fanon’s

                                                                                                               475 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 257. 476 Ibid., 258. The FLN was the nationalist group that had led the fight for Algerian independence under Fanon’s theoretical leadership. Although the nationalist movement had encompassed much of Algerian society, it was also responsible for an “intense polarization” that resulted in the marginalization of the educated elite and those who wished to survive the war by the least violent means possible (Henry, “Postcolonial Dialectics of Civil Society,” 16). Thus, following liberation in 1962, Algeria’s divided ruling class was ill-equipped to face the challenges of nationalization and self-management, and the military hampered progress toward democracy by undercutting the authority of emerging democratic institutions. This allowed the FLN to take power and remain as Algeria’s sole political party for nearly thirty years (Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 51; see also Thomson, Introduction to African Politics). 477 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 258. After a military coup d’état removed Algeria’s first president, Ahmed Ben Bella, from power in 1965, Colonel Houari Boumediene attempted to instate “authentic” socialism, effectively granting the FLN and the military monopoly over the state (Thomson, Introduction to African Politics, 233). Boumediene, like Ben Bella before him, worked hard to eliminate political opposition, promoting an ideology of revolutionary solidarity that emphasized the importance of a strong, centralized state for advancing Algerian nationalism and strengthening the economy (Layachi, “Algeria,” 174).

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mythology of an authentic Algerian identity, renewed and purified through violence.478

Writing at the turn of the millennium, Le Sueur reflects on how the “legacy of anti-

colonialism” and the “failure of identity politics” could still be felt in Algeria after nearly

forty years of independence: 479 “It is without surprise,” he writes, “that our

contemporaries now speak of the ‘Second Algerian War.’”480 What is both surprising and

tragic, Le Sueur argues, “is that the leaders who had suffered the agony of torture at the

hands of a desperate France” had become, decades later, the purveyors of similarly

atrocious measures of repression within their own country.481

As French intellectuals who “benefit[ted] from liberty,” Derrida and Bourdieu

believed they had “an obligation to speak” in defense of the Algerian men and women

whose liberty was imperiled by the events of the Black Decade.482 For Derrida, this

obligation was tied to the political lessons of his childhood in Algeria. In a 1992

interview with Derek Attridge, Derrida recalled that as a member of groups that pushed

for colonial reform in the late 1940s, he understood the importance of speaking out

against his and others’ repression: “As an adolescent,” he said, “I no doubt had the

feeling that I was living in conditions where it was both difficult and therefore necessary,

urgent, to say things that are not allowed.”483 The plight of Algerian “intellectuals and

creators”—who, if they had not been forced “to pay with their lives for exercising the

constitutive liberties of intelligence,” were often “living in inner exile, writing under

                                                                                                               478 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 258. 479 Ibid. 480 Ibid. 481 Ibid. 482 CISIA, “Charte du CISIA.” “Parce que nous bénéficions de libertés, nous avons un devoir de parole.”

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pseudonyms to protect themselves”—therefore resonated with Derrida on a deeply

personal level, carrying with it the import of a long-held moral imperative.484

Bourdieu was more ambivalent about intervening in the Black Decade, but the

assassination of a former student, the sociologist Mohammed Boukhobza, on June 27,

1993, underscored the importance of his participation with the CISIA.485 Compelled by

the tragedies of that year to become involved in spite of himself, Bourdieu became a

reluctant but prominent leader of the CISIA.486 Having been elected to the Collège de

France in 1981, by the 1990s Bourdieu had become “the leading French intellectual of

the time,” and as president of the CISIA’s international chapter, he lent status,

recognition, and legitimacy to the organization.487

Over the course of his ascension in the national and international scientific

domains, Bourdieu had gradually and unintentionally reduced his scientific interest and

attention for Algeria, such that what had once been a central and explicit object of

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           483 Jacques Derrida and Derek Attridge, “‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Acts of Literature/Jacques Derrida (New York: Routledge, 1992), 38. 484 CISIA, “Charte du CISIA,” [Paris, July 1, 1993], IMEC, DRR 194. “[L]es intellectuels et créateurs algériens, mis par le terrorisme en situation de payer de leur vie l’exercice des libertés constitutives de l’intelligence [...] Certains d’entre eux vivent déjà dans l’exil intérieur, écrivent sous des pseudonymes pour se protéger.” Dominique Fisher, in her analysis of the writings of Assia Djebar and Tahar Djaout, advances the thesis that the anti-intellectual violence and threats of the Black Decade intensified the necessity for Algerian intellectuals to speak out against repression by producing works of literature, art, and culture. See Dominique Fisher, Écrire l’urgence: Assia Djebar et Tahar Djaout (Paris: Harmattan, 2007). 485 Chachoua, “Pierre Bourdieu et l’Algérie,” n.p.; Djebar, Le blanc de l’Algérie, 248. The CISIA’s charter gives June 22, 1993 as the date of Boukhobza’s death; however, by Djebar’s account, he was killed on June 27. Trusting in Djebar’s authority, and that of her editors, I use the latter date above, while also acknowledging this uncertainty. 486 See Chachoua, “Pierre Bourdieu et l’Algérie,” n.p.

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analysis became absent from his sociological work beginning in the mid-1970s.488 Kamel

Chachoua attributes much of this “distancing” to the instatement, in 1974, of a ban that

prohibited ethnology from being practiced in Algeria. 489 But despite Bourdieu’s

diminished direct involvement with Algeria, Chachoua believes he maintained “the

genuine personal commitment of a citizen to a modern and democratic Algeria,” a claim

that finds indirect support within the CISIA’s actions and pronouncements.490

As Derrida would recall in his 2002 seminar, he and Bourdieu came together to

form the CISIA on June 17, 1993, along with other prominent French intellectuals such

as Jean Leca, Étienne Balibar, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Sami Naïr. 491 Within the

organization’s charter, dated July 1, 1993, they evoked the “hundreds of deaths” that had

recently occurred as a result of political violence in Algeria.492 In the preceding weeks,

they noted, these killings had increasingly and methodically targeted “scientists,

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           487 Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Leca, newsletter to friends of the CISIA [January 12, 1994], IMEC, DRR 194. Bourdieu was president of the CISIA’s international chapter, and Jean Leca was president of CISIA France (see ibid.). 488 Chachoua, “Pierre Bourdieu et l’Algérie,” n.p. 489 Ibid. This ban came as a result of the 24th International Congress of Sociology, held in Algiers in March 1974 (ibid.). For the “arabization” policies advanced under Boumediene, which “unintentionally fueled” the rise of political Islam and the eventual popularity of the FIS, see Stone, Agony of Algeria, 19. 490 Chachoua, “Pierre Bourdieu et l’Algérie,” n.p.; Phillip C. Naylor, France and Algeria: A History of Decolonization and Transformation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 385n133. With the exception of a handful of articles, the review Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, over which Bourdieu presided from 1975 until his death in 2002, never published an issue on the theme of Algeria, colonialism, or Islam (Chachoua, “Pierre Bourdieu et l’Algérie,” n.p.). In 1995, however, Bourdieu founded Alternatives Algériennes, a journal “dedicated to promoting discussion among the French and the Algerians” (Naylor, France and Algeria, 385n.133). 491 See CISIA, “Charte du CISIA.” 492 CISIA, “Charte du CISIA.” “La violence politique a fait des centaines de morts en Algérie” (ibid.).

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intellectuals, [and] men of culture.” 493 The victims named in the charter included

Boukhobza, dead “of a slit throat;” the psychiatry professor Mahfoud Boucebci, stabbed

in the heart on June 15; and, most famously, the poet and journalist Tahar Djaout, shot

twice in the head on May 26.494 The CISIA’s members asserted that these deaths, and

others like them, amounted to nothing less than the assassination of intelligence within

Algeria.495

Alger ia in Cris i s

The CISIA’s charter began with the acknowledgement that “Algeria’s entry into

political modernity and pluralism [was] occurring with terrible violence.” 496 The

bloodshed that began in October 1988 with the repression of nationwide riots had given

way, the Committee lamented,

to the violence of protests by Islamist priests, the violence of the interruption

of the electoral process, the violence of the scrap metal fired at those wish to

topple the powers that be; to multiple violations of human rights, terrorist

violence, and the State’s excessive use of violence in implementing security

measures amidst a state of emergency.497

                                                                                                               493 Ibid. “Voilà qu’elle prend pour cible depuis quelques semaines, de manière méthodique, des scientifiques, des intellectuels et des hommes de culture” (ibid.). 494 Ibid. “Tahar Djaout, écrivain et journaliste, reçoit le 26 mai 1993 deux balles dans la tête. Avant lui étaient tombés Hafid Senhadri, le sociologue Djallali Liabès, le médecin et écrivain Laadi Flici. Le 15 juin Mahfoud Boucebci, professeur de psychiatrie, est poignardé au cœur. Le 22 juin, M’Hammed Boukhobza, sociologue, à la gorge tranchée" (ibid.). 495 Ibid. “C’est l’intelligence qu’on assassine” (ibid.). 496 Ibid. “L’entrée de l’Algérie dans la modernité politique et le pluralisme se fait dans une terrible violence” (ibid.). 497 Ibid. “Violence de la répression sanglante des émeutes d’octobre 1988 ; violence protestaire des prèches islamistes ; violence de l’interruption du processus électorale ; violence de tirs de mitraille contre ceux qui veulent faire basculer le pouvoir en place ;

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Compounding these problems, the “ferocious” confrontation of the State and terrorist

forces, which “bordered,” at the time of the charter’s creation, “on a state of civil war,”

rested on “a base of economic disaster.”498 “All of this,” the CISIA’s members wrote,

“occurs as if this nation, so dear to proponents of progress the world over, and which

once was a beacon of the Third World, were taking the exact opposite course from that

to which it aspired.”499

The turn of the 1990s had, in fact, represented a brief moment of hope for

Algeria’s transition to a plural democracy. Popular discontentment with the military

regime had escalated following the death of Algeria’s second president, Houari

Boumediene, in 1976.500 By the late 1980s, after almost thirty years of single-party rule,

revolutionary allegiances had largely died out, clearing the way for a populist uprising

against the FLN elite.501 The situation came to a head during the first week of October in

1988, when spontaneous rioting spread from Algiers to all major towns and cities.502

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           violations répétées des droits de l’homme ; violence terroriste et violence sécuritaire de l’Etat d’urgence” (ibid.). 498 Ibid. “[A]rc-boutées dans un duel féroce qui confine à la guerre civile, sur fond de désastre économique.” Under Algeria’s second president, Houari Boumediene, attempts to construct a strong socialist state had improved healthcare, education, and social services for many Algerians, but also produced a boated bureaucracy, stagnant agricultural production, and consequent food scarcity (Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 51). Reliant on foreign earnings from oil and gas revenues, the State appeared bankrupt by the late 1980s (Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 51). Attempts by Boumediene’s successor, Chadli Benjedid, “to restructure, to liberalize, and [to] reduce debt,” resulted in unemployment for many Algerians, and impacted the youth most severely; the 1986 fuel crisis only exacerbated Algeria’s already perilous economic situation. (Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 51). An Algerian news article from 1990 reports that the country’s income disparity had grown so great that 5% of the population earned 45% of the national income (Layachi, “Algeria,” 175; citing an article from El-Monjahid [Algiers: January 29, 1990]). 499 Ibid. “Tout se passe comme si ce pays, cher aux progressistes du monde entier, qui a été phare du Tiers-Monde, prenait l’exact contrepied de ce à quoi il aspire.” 500 Layachi, “Algeria,” 176; see also Thomson, Introduction to African Politics, 234. 501 Layachi, “Algeria,” 176-177. 502 Layachi, “Algeria,” 176.

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Islamic activists played a significant role in organizing the protests; they supplemented

existing opposition by mobilizing hundreds of thousands of unemployed youths to

establish a more formal campaign for multi-party democracy, and thus gained

considerable influence over Algerian society as the authority of the official government

began to collapse.503

The protests forced Boumediene’s successor, Chadli Benjedid, to concede to

holding Algeria’s first democratic elections, which began with the election of local

officials in June 1990.504 During this first foray into democracy, as Luis Martinez explains,

“the existence of more than fifty political parties and the free tone of the press seemed

to be tying the country firmly to a plural system.”505 However, as Layachi notes, “the

only significant players in the political arena were affiliated with the Islamist

movement.”506 The Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), which formed in 1989, posed the

greatest threat to the incumbent FLN, obtaining 188 of the 430 available parliamentary

seats in the first round of elections.507

In response to this defeat, the FLN annulled the results and cancelled the

forthcoming round of elections, leading the most fervent supporters of the Islamist

                                                                                                               503 Layachi, “Algeria,” 181. Islamic activists opened souks to provide goods at more affordable pries than on the regular markets; established a system of popular courts to “settle disputes with more justice, speed, and efficiency than did the state system;” formed local militias’ and served as unofficial traffic police when none were on duty (Thomson, Introduction to African Politics, 243; see also Layachi, “Algeria,” 182). 504 Layachi, “Algeria,” 177; Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 51. 505 Martinez, “Algerian Civil War,” 20. 506 Layachi, “Algeria,” 177. 507 Layachi, “Algeria,” 177-178. Voter turnout in the election was 24.6%, and the FIS obtained 47% of the popular vote; the FLN, in comparison, captured only 23.38% of votes, earning just 15 parliamentary seats—even fewer than the FIS’s runner-up, the Front of Socialist Forces (ibid.).

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movement to take up arms.508 In the months that followed, the Armée Islamique du

Salut, a militarized faction of the FIS, attacked state employees and structures; the

Groupes Islamiques Armées, more radical still, began to target all manifestations and

known proponents of secularism.509 As the violence of the Islamist movement increased,

many of its leaders were arrested and the FIS itself was outlawed.510 The military, led by

Major General Khaled Nezzar, dissolved parliament and forced Chadli to resign,

instating a provisional ruling body, the Haut Comité d’État (HCE).511 As political leaders,

journalists, and university professors began fleeing from Algeria to escape the violence, a

state of emergency was declared February 9, 1992.512 The conflict between the military

and the FIS emerged into a full-fledged “civil war” in 1993, when “assassinations, car

bombs, massacres, and gun battles” became daily occurrences.513

The CISIA’s Charter

The CISIA refused to view the “spiral of destruction” taking place in Algeria as

an inevitable sequence of events.514 Instead, its members “want[ed] to believe in a plural,

creative, and open Algeria, [and] to work to keep this hope alive.”515 To this end, the

group was anxious “to express international support for the Algerian intellectuals who

                                                                                                               508 Layachi, “Algeria,” 177-178. 509 Layachi, “Algeria,” 177-178; Martinez, Algerian Civil War, 20; Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 52. 510 Layachi, “Algeria,” 178. 511 Thomson, Introduction to African Politics,” 237. The HCE, backed by a military dictatorship, remained Algeria’s official leadership until 1999, although it coexisted with widespread local guerilla rule by autonomous terrorist groups (see Stone, Agony of Algeria). 512 Layachi, “Algeria,” 178. 513 Martinez, Algerian Civil War, 20. 514 Ibid. “[Le Comité] refuse de se résigner au caractère inéluctable de l’engrenage destructeur” (ibid.). 515 Ibid. “[I]l veut croire en une Algérie plurielle, créatrice et ouverte, il veut contribuer à entretenir l’espoir” (ibid.).

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were exercising freedom of expression within their own country,”516 both by working to

put an end to the “logic of violence” that prevailed, and by “facilitating the reception [in

France and internationally] of those [intellectuals] who [were] menaced or persecuted.”517

This project, as the charter notes, received early support from “internationally renowned

professors, scientists and writers,” as well as “thousands of men and women from all

around the world, but first and foremost from Algerians living abroad.”518

The CISIA, as an international organization of intellectuals whose aim was to

protect and defend other intellectuals, took a decidedly academic approach, resolving to

“express their solidarity with the Algerian people using the resources at hand: the spoken

and written word.”519 These means, they argued, delimited for the organization three

central areas of responsibility: first, “to alert public opinion to the dangers Algerian

intellectuals and artists face;” second, “to reaffirm the indivisibility of human rights;” and

finally, “to attempt to understand and explain the events taking place while avoiding

abusive schematizations, clichés, and approximations.”520 This last requirement was

especially important, for it entailed representing the conflict realistically, and with

sensitivity to the Algerian people’s demands; it meant “saying, for example, that the

                                                                                                               516 Bourdieu and Leca, newsletter to friends of the CISIA. “[E]xprimer le soutien international aux intellectuels algériens qui exercent dans leur pays leur droit de libre expression” (ibid.). 517 Ibid. “[F]aciliter l’accueil de ceux qui sont menacés ou persécutés” (ibid.). 518 CISIA, “Charte du CISIA.” “Son appel à rompre l’isolement de l’Algérie, et particulièrement de ses intellectuels, a reçu le soutien d’universitaires, de scientifiques, d’écrivains de renommé internationale, et a recueilli l’adhésion de milliers d’hommes et de femmes du monde entier, à commencer par les Algériens vivant à l’étranger” (ibid.; see end matter for full list of CISIA’s members and supporters, as provided in ibid.). 519 Ibid. “Que peuvent faire des intellectuels pour manifester leur solidarité envers le peuple algérien avec les moyens qui sont les leurs : la parole et la plume ?” (ibid.). 520 Ibid. “Alerter d’abord les opinions publiques quant aux menaces pesant sur les intellectuels et créateurs algériens;” “Réaffirmer l’indivisibilité des droits de la personne

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current situation cannot be reduced to a murderous face-off between Islamists and the

State,” but rather, that “there exist within Algerian society forces that aspire to peace and

civility, to democracy, to a broadening of horizons, and to happiness.” 521 Moreover, it

meant acknowledging, despite many European’s suspicions to the contrary, that Islam

was “not, by nature, incompatible with a lawful State.”522

The CISIA’s concrete actions toward accomplishing these objectives included

various efforts “to reinforce the bonds between the international scientific and cultural

community and Algerian institutions.”523 As an international organization founded on

the principle of universal freedom of expression, the CISIA took its role to include

initiating public discussions, with the overarching objective of formulating “proposals to

multiply the acts of solidarity in France and in other nations.”524 Above all, as they

explained in a press release from 1993, the CISIA believed in the need to cultivate and to

reinforce, “despite the difficulties and risks” involved, “individual connections,

cooperation, and exchange [...] between Algeria and the external world,” especially

insofar as these measures allowed for “the circulation of people and ideas” and the

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           humaine” (ibid.); “Tenter de comprendre et d’expliquer les événements en cours en dehors des schématisations abusives, des clichés, des approximations” (ibid.). 521 Ibid. “Dire par exemple que la situation actuelle ne se réduit pas à une face-à-face meurtrière entre les islamistes et le pouvoir, qu’il existe dans la société algérienne des forces aspirant à la paix civile, à la démocratie, à l’ouverture sur le monde, au bonheur enfin” (ibid.). 522 Ibid. “Dire aussi que l’Islam n’est pas, par nature, incompatible avec un Etat de droit” (ibid.). 523 Ibid. “Concrètement, le CISIA œuvre au renforcement des liens entre la communauté scientifique et culturelle internationale et les institutions algériens” (ibid.). 524 CISIA, “Appel pour la paix civile en Algérie.” “Des propositions seront faites afin de multiplier les actions de solidarité en France et dans d’autres pays.”

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protection of universal human rights.525 In its effort to establish connections between

Algerian intellectuals and international institutions, the CISIA therefore straddled the

divide between insisting on the movement toward a modern, secular, and plural

democracy in Algeria, and helping persecuted intellectuals to take refuge abroad.526

Hospitality and Political Asylum

The CISIA presented its efforts to facilitate asylum for Algerian intellectuals as

part and parcel of its support for the country’s democratic demands, undertaken in the

interest of allowing these individuals “to continue living in their country [eventually], and

in order to prevent the worst from befalling Algeria.”527 The group held the firm

conviction that intellectuals, especially in their broad socio-professional definition as “the

creators and ‘mediators’” of culture, were integral to the future of Algerian society as a

whole, and particularly to a plural Algerian democracy, supported and regulated by a

healthy civil society.528

As Derrida explained, the CISIA operated on the belief that “critical thought and

free speech” were the “principle adversaries” of “those who wish to attain or maintain

power under undemocratic conditions.”529 Consequently, they believed, “intellectuals,

                                                                                                               525 Ibid. “Enfin, il est de l’intérêt de tous de favoriser aujourd’hui, malgré les difficultés et les risques, le renforcement des liens individuels, de la coopération, des échanges, de la circulation des personnes et des idées entre l’Algérie et le monde extérieur.” 526 See CISIA, “Charte du CISIA.” 527 CISIA, notes for a national demonstration in Nantes [March 25, 1995], IMEC, DRR 194. “Pour que les Algériens puissent continuer à vivre dans leur pays et à le préserver du pire...” (ibid.). 528 Sirinelli, Génération intellectuelle, 9. 529 Derrida, correspondence with Metref. “Dès lors, ceux qui veulent accéder au pouvoir ou le garder dans des conditions non-démocratiques ont pour adversaires principaux et le savoir critique et la parole libre” (ibid.).

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scholars, artists, [and] professionals with advanced scientific and technical skills”

represent “a major stake for all State powers, present or potential.”530 On these grounds,

the CISIA aimed to provide these individuals with refuge and professional opportunities

in France and elsewhere, with the hope that they would be able to repatriate once the

violence abated, and that in doing so, they would fortify Algerian civil society for the

transition toward a functioning democracy.

In a newsletter dated January 12, 1994, Bourdieu and Leca anticipated the

CISIA’s need to address the “concrete issues” involved in welcoming Algerian refugees,

such as helping them to obtain “visas, lodging, employment, and medical care.”531 This

project proved exceedingly difficult, however, as movements to assist Algerian refugees

met with strong resistance in France. As early as November 25, 1993, the CISIA became

aware of the French government’s refusal “to appear to sanction a ‘brain drain’ with

respect to the State” by allowing large numbers of Algerian intellectuals to obtain

political asylum in France.532 However, the greatest obstacle to political asylum was

already in place—it arose from the fact that Algerian “intellectuals being threatened by

the FIS, or who believe that they are in danger, cannot legally demand political asylum

[in France] because they are not persecuted by a State.”533

                                                                                                               530 Ibid. “Les intellectuels, les savants, les artistes, les hommes et les femmes qui exercent des professions de haute qualification technique et scientifique constituent aujourd’hui pour tous les pouvoirs d’Etat, actuels ou virtuels, un enjeu majeur" (ibid.). 531 Bourdieu and Leca, newsletter to friends of the CISIA. “Des solutions aux problèmes concrets (permis de séjour, logement, travail, soins) que pose l’accueil de réfugiés” (ibid.). 532 Barbaresques, meeting notes [November 25, 1993], IMEC, DRR 194. “Du côté français on se refuse, en effet, à paraître officialiser une ‘fuite des cerveaux,’ vis-à-vis de l’Etat algérien” (ibid.). 533 Ibid. “Par ailleurs, les intellectuels menacés par le FIS, ou se sentant en danger, ne peuvent pas juridiquement invoquer l’asile politique puisqu’ils ne sont pas persécutés per un Etat” (ibid.).

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Campaign o f Civ i l Res is tance

Beginning in 1994, Derrida and Bourdieu—along with Sami Naïr, who was then

a professor at the Université de Paris VIII—led the CISIA in calling for a campaign of

“civil resistance” against France’s restriction of its immigration policies. 534 The

annulment, on December 20 of that year, of a special statute on residence permits for

Algerians that had remained in place since the Algerian revolution, prompted them to

launch an urgent appeal in Le Monde on December 29.535 In the days since the statute’s

revocation, the article explained, “town halls and administrations have rejected numerous

demands [from Algerians requesting political asylum in France]. These are potential

victims, unable to flee from civil war.”536 Bourdieu, Derrida, and Naïr denounced this

state of affairs, accusing the French government of the “crime of failing to assist a

person in danger.”537 They declared: “In order to combat this failure, we are calling for

an inventory of every breach of republican law with regard to citizenship and the right of

asylum. [...] We demand the repeal of the discriminatory measures affecting foreigners

and immigrants, and the return to the republican practice of the right of asylum.538

In spite of these requests, the French government further tightened its

restrictions on the right of asylum the following year, leading to what Luc Legoux has

                                                                                                               534 Jennings, “Dilemmas of the Intellectual,” 79-80. 535 Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and Sami Naïr, “Assez!,” [drafts for an article published in Le Monde, 1996], IMEC, DRR 194. “En France restait un statut particulier pour le droit au séjour des Algériens. Depuis le 20 décembre ce statut n’existe plus” (ibid.). 536 Ibid. “Les administrations, les maires refoulent les demandes. Ce sont des victimes potentielles, qui ne peuvent fuir la guerre civile” (ibid.). 537 Ibid. “Nous dénonçons le crime de non-assistance de personne en danger” (ibid.). 538 Ibid. “Nous appelons à recenser, pour les combattre, tous les manquements à la loi républicaine en matière de droit d’asile et de citoyenneté. Notre but immédiat tient dans une seule revendication : nous demandons l’abrogation des mesures discriminatoires à

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called a “crisis of political asylum in France.”539 Algerians, still attempting to flee in large

numbers from the violence of the Black Decade, suffered disproportionately from this

crisis. As a case in point, an article published on February 27, 1996 in Le Monde declares

1995 the “black year” of the right of asylum in France.540 Based on the most recent data

available to them, its authors explain that out of 2,208 Algerian candidates for asylum in

1995, only 16 were able to obtain refugee cards; accordingly, the rate of acceptance for

Algerians dropped drastically, from 1.24% in 1994, to 0.72% in 1995.541

The Cris i s o f Pol i t i ca l Asylum

In an article published in Le Monde in 1995, Derrida, Bourdieu, and Naïr

expressed their indignation over the “sinister consequences” of the immigration reforms

of 1993 and 1994, and reiterated the goals of their campaign of civil resistance.542 They

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           l’égard des étrangers, des immigrés, et le retour à la pratique républicaine du droit d’asile” (ibid.). 539 See Legoux, Crise d’asile politique en France. 540 Philippe Bernard and Nathaniel Herzberg, “1995, l’année noire du droit d’asile en France,” Le Monde, February 27, 1996. Based on the most recent data available to them, the journalists announced that, in 1995, the overall rate at which demands for asylum were accepted had fallen to its lowest point since 1974. Thus, while 1994 saw the delivery of 7,025 refugee cards and a positive response rate of 23.65% on all demands for asylum, only 2,825 refugee cards had been granted by the end of November 1995, lowering the percentage of refuges granted asylum to 11.56% of the 24,421 total responses rendered to applicants. 541  Philippe Bernard and Nathaniel Herzberg, “1995, l’année noire du droit d’asile en France,” Le Monde, February 27, 1996. The exact number of Algerian refugees in France at this time was unknown even to the authors of the 1996 report, who noted that “certain [Algerians] whose demands for asylum were rejected were allowed to obtain a territorial asylum, on the model of that accorded to the Bosnians” during the Bosnia-Herzegovina War of 1992-1995. The minister of the interior kept the number of beneficiaries of such a status secret, but the authors speculated that it was less than one thousand. They also warned that territorial asylum, “theoretically renewed every three months, keeps refugees in a state of extreme insecurity, because no legal document precisely defines the limits of such a status” (ibid.). 542 Pierre Bourdieu et al., “Assez!” “Destinées, dit-on, à ‘maitriser’ les flux migratoires, consolidées, on devrait dire surarmées ma même année par la réforme constitutionnelle qui restreint le droit d’asile, les lois de juillet et août 1993 montrent désormais leurs

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called on “all those who have lost their bearings in a France of repressive

conservatism—hypocritical and demagogic, above all else—; in a France of police

control, of administrative investigations, of certificates of lodging and other, similar

measures,” for support in holding the government to these demands.543

Taking this campaign to the streets, the CISIA participated in a national protest

against the French authorities’ treatment of immigrants and foreigners. At this

demonstration, held on March 25, 1995, in Nantes, they articulated the following

demands: first, for “the resumption of the normal delivery of visas, [with] a minimum of

refusals, [and] a shorter and simpler [application] procedure;” second, for “the granting

and renewal of long-stay visas, allowing multiple entries, for the class of endangered

people not considering exile;” and, third, for “the rushed delivery of visas to applicants

facing death threats.”544

As Derrida, Bourdieu, and Naïr noted within their article in Le Monde, Nantes

was a symbolic venue for the immigration rally, as Algerians seeking refuge were being

directed there upon their arrival in France, in “an interminable process destined to failure

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           sinistres conséquences... Jusqu’ici, les Algériens pouvaient bénéficier d’un statut particulier au moins pour le droit de séjour, sinon à la résidence. Les décrets publiés au JO le 20 décembre 1994 viennent de les en priver” (ibid.). 543 Bourdieu et al., “Assez !” “Nous nous adressons ici à tous ceux qui ne se reconnaissent plus dans la France du conservatisme répressif, --avant tout, hypocrite et démagogique--, dans la France du contrôle policier, dans la France de l’enquête administrative, des certificats d’hébergement et autres dispositions analogues. Nous les appelons à se joindre à nous dans un vaste mouvement de résistance civique qui, en accord avec d’autres associations, devra recenser, pour les combattre, tous les manquements à la loi républicain en matière de droit d’asile et de citoyenneté.” 544 Bourdieu et al., “Assez!” “Le CISIA demande aux autorités françaises : la reprise de la délivrance normale des visas (un minimum de refus, une procédure moins longue et plus simple) ; l’octroi et le renouvellement de visas longue durée à multiples entrées pour les catégories de personnes exposées qui n’envisagent pas l’exil ; la délivrance de visas en urgence pour les personnes menacées de mort qui en font la demande” (ibid.).

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in 80% to 90% of cases.”545 Evoking “hundreds of testimonies describing the inhumane

and unscrupulous policies” being applied by the majority of local administrations, they

concluded that the French government was ceding its responsibilities to the regional

level, “giving [mayors] the supremely arbitrary possibility to grant or refuse permits of

entry and residence at their will.”546

The state of emergency in Algeria, they argued, exacerbated this injustice. “The

situation is all the more painful for the Algerians,” they wrote,

as it is provoked by a civil war taking place in their home country, in which

France is playing a contradictory role and taking on questionable

responsibilities. However one evaluates these responsibilities, in the name of

what principles might [a government] nonetheless refuse to take in innocent

victims and all those who are fleeing from a civil war?547

The CISIA argued that this refusal, which the French government cast as part of an

ostensible “return to common law” with respect to foreigners in France, betrayed “the

ignominy of racial laws” inspired by xenophobic sentiment.548 An unpublished draft of

the article, more damning still, accused the French government of “choosing to support

the regime in power” in Algeria, thus contributing to “the exacerbation of the violent

                                                                                                               545 Ibid. “Comme si ne suffisait pas le détour par le service de Nantes, démarche interminable et le plus souvent (pour 80% à 90%) voué à l’échec!” (ibid.). 546 Ibid. “Des centaines de témoignages convergent pour décrire la politique inhumaine et éhontée que la plupart des administrations concernées mettent en place à l’égard des requérants. L’État se dessaisit désormais de ses responsabilités en faveur des maires, en leur donnant la possibilité, arbitraire au plus haut point, de délivrer ou refuser à leur guise les autorisations d’entrée et d’accueil des étrangers” (ibid.). 547 Ibid. “La situation est d’autant plus douloureuse pour les Algériens qu’elle est déterminée par la guerre civile qui se poursuit chez eux, et dans laquelle la France joue un rôle contradictoire et prend des responsabilités discutables. De quelque manière qu’on évalue ces responsabilités, au nom de quels principes refuser encore d’accueillir des victimes innocentes et tous ceux qui fuient une guerre civile ?” (ibid.).

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battles” taking place, “while refusing to provide shelter to the victims of these same

battles.”549

Finally, CISIA’s pronouncement in Le Monde illustrates the manner in which this

group of intellectuals aimed to justify its position on immigration. Recalling the centrality

of the right to political asylum within French republican ideology, as well as the

republic’s long history of failing to live up to this ideal, they wrote: “Each time that

France has aspired to being the nation of the rights of man, the land of the right of

asylum and of universal hospitality toward the victims of tyranny, it has had to battle

xenophobia and the patriotic masks of sordid egoism.”550 Taking up the legacy of the

Dreyfus Affair, they asserted that “those who had wished to condemn Dreyfus paved

the way for those who elected Pétain.”551

By calling to mind two landmark moments in France’s political and intellectual

history—the Dreyfus Affair and the Vichy occupation—Bourdieu, Derrida, and Naïr

situated their actions within a long and varied lineage of intellectual engagement.

According to this tradition, the intellectual—be he a defender of Dreyfus or a member

of the Resistance—was conceived first and foremost as an individual whose political role

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           548 Ibid. “Nous dénonçons l’ignominie des lois raciales déguisées en retour au droit commun” (ibid.). 549 Ibid. Derrida crossed out these last lines, advocating in favor of the more tactful approach that appears in the final version of the article: “L’État français semble, en effet, avoir choisi le soutien au régime en place en Algérie. Nous ne discuterons pas ici ce choix par ailleurs contestable. Nous posons seulement une question : comment justifier le soutien à ce régime—contribuant ainsi à l’exacerbation des affrontements violents et, en même temps, refuser d’accueillir les victimes de ces mêmes affrontements ?” (ibid.).  550 Ibid. “Chaque fois qu’elle a voulu être le pays des droits de l’homme, la terre du droit d’asile et de l’hospitalité universelle aux victimes des tyrannies, la France a dû combattre la haine xénophobe et les masques patriotiques de l’égoïsme sordide” (ibid.). 551 Ibid. “Ceux qui voulaient condamner Dreyfus ont ouvert la voie à ceux qui plébiscitèrent Pétain” (ibid.).

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entailed participating in a collective intervention intended to promote tolerance and

deliver justice.

France, t erre d ’as i l e?

In condemning the French government’s attempt to close its borders to Algerian

refugees, the CISIA touched on the principles of political liberty at the heart of France’s

national identity, and partook of a greater contemporary debate over the nation’s

imperiled self-conception as a “terre d’asile” (land of asylum). 552 By couching their

criticism of the republican government in the rhetoric of republican values, the CISIA’s

representatives echoed the strategy of the French Algerian liberals, who denounced

colonial abuses by weighing them unfavorably against republican ideals. Leveling the

failure of the republican right of asylum against the republican authorities, the CISIA

similarly fought to restore the republican practice of asylum by unmasking the French

government’s self-contradiction.

Among the principles to emerge from the Enlightenment and the Revolution of

1789 was an imperative to provide asylum for the victims of persecutions. Throughout

the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, France was Europe’s foremost

immigration country, and immigration occupied a central place in French political

ideology. 553 Beyond its role in countering demographic stagnation and a dearth of young

men available for military conscription, France’s “inclusionary stance” toward foreigners

                                                                                                               552 Luc Legoux, La crise d’asile politique en France (Paris: Centre Français sur la Population et le Développement, 1995), xv. 553 Saskia Sassen, Guests and Aliens (New York: The New Press, 1999), 64.

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played into a “rational, state-centered and assimilationist conception of nationhood” that

dated back to even before the Revolution, with roots in the “ancien régime.”554

Beginning in 1974, however, France restricted its immigration policies, putting an

end to economic immigration in response to the 1973 Oil Crisis and the subsequent

economic downturn.555 Facing increased requests for political asylum amidst a global

context of escalating political crises and human rights abuses, France revised the criteria

for political refuge in 1974, limiting “the granting of refugee status only to individuals

subject to persecution by the authorities of their own country, and who did not have a

first country of asylum.”556 These new standards for asylum were very much at odds with

the common interpretation of the Geneva Convention, to which France had subscribed

in 1951, and as we have seen, they meant near disaster for the Algerian intellectuals who

were persecuted during the Black Decade. 557 Thus, Legoux confirms, “Algerian

intellectuals seeking asylum in France in 1994 rightly feared for their lives, yet their

requests for asylum were automatically groundless under the French interpretation, given

that they were not facing persecution by their own government.”558

                                                                                                               554 Sassen, Guests and Aliens, 64. 555 Legoux, Crise d’asile politique, xxiii. 556 Ibid., xxiv. The sole exception to these restrictions, which “could be used to exclude every situation of war and generalized violence present throughout the world,” included Southeast Asian refugees who were accepted into France under a quota system (ibid.). 557 Ibid., xxiv. 558 Ibid., xxiv-xxv; Garret Wallace Brown and David Held, The Cosmopolitanism Reader (Polity, 2011), 416. “[T]he right to asylum has only recently become a specifically juridical concept (définitionnelle) and a positive juridical concept, despite the fact that its spirit was already present in the French Constitution. The Constitution of 1946 granted the right of asylum only to those characterized as persons persecuted because of their ‘action in the name of liberty.’ Even though it subscribed to the Geneva Convention in 1951, it is only in 1954 that France was forced to broaden its definition of a political refugee to encompass all persons forced into exile because ‘their lives or their liberties

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Derrida drew on Legoux’s work to inform his understanding of these events,

even referring to Legoux directly in a speech delivered before the International

Parliament of Writers in Strasbourg in 1996. Addressing what struck him as an especially

significant dimension of the injustice against political refugees in France, Derrida

explained that under the pretense of “immigrant control,” the French government

restricted the right of asylum “only to those who cannot expect the slightest economic

benefit upon immigration.”559 Derrida decried the “absurdity” of this regulation, which

directly contradicted the CISIA’s goal of creating opportunities for Algerian intellectuals

to practice their professions abroad:

How can a truly political refugee claim to have been truly welcomed into a

new settlement without that entailing some form of economic gain? He will

of course have to work, for each individual seeking refuge cannot simply be

placed in the care of the host country. This gives rise to an important

consideration which our conventions will have to address: how can the hosts

(hôtes) and guests of cities of refuge be helped to recreate, through work and

creative activity, a living and durable network in new places and occasionally

in a new language?560

These, as the CISIA’s pronouncements have shown, were the pragmatic challenges to

which the organization attempted to respond. Moreover, for Derrida, the “distinction

between [the] economic and [the] political” raised ethical questions—about the nature of

cosmopolitanism and hospitality, of politics and friendship—which he brought to bear

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           are found to be under threat by reason of their race, religion, or political opinions” (Brown and Held, Cosmopolitanism Reader, 416). 559 Jacques Derrida, “On Cosmopolitanism,” (address to the International Parliament of Writers in Strasbourg, 1996) in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (Routledge, 2003), 27. 560 Ibid.

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implicitly on the CISIA’s activities, but also explored explicitly and extensively within his

philosophical work from this period.

Continuing his speech before the International Parliament of Writers, Derrida

argued: “The distinction between economic and political is not [...] merely abstract and

gratuitous: it is truly hypocritical and perverse; it makes it virtually impossible ever to

grant asylum and even, in a sense, to apply the law.”561 When political asylum is

conceived as separate from all economic factors, Derrida argued, the political “discourse

on the refugee, asylum or hospitality risks becoming nothing but pure rhetorical alibis,”

for the enactment of asylum through legal measures is impeded when “its

implementation [...] depend[s] entirely on opportunistic considerations, occasionally

electoral and political, which, in the last analysis, become a matter for the police, of real

or imaginary security issues, of demography, of the market.”562 Quoting Legoux directly,

Derrida argued that the failure of France’s asylum laws for the people of poor countries

was “the result of a particular concept of asylum, one with a long and complex history,

and one which is becoming ever more stringent.”563

These statements cut to the heart of Derrida’s philosophical thinking about

hospitality, a concept whose tenuousness necessitates a constant negotiation between the

impossible ideal of absolute hospitality—complete openness to foreigners, without

limitations on their presence, rights, or modes of existence—and the social, legislative,

and political measures involved in enacting this ideal. These measures are at once

impediments to the ideal, and the only hope for its de facto implementation. However,

                                                                                                               561 Ibid., 28. 562 Ibid. 563 Ibid., 12-13.

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as Derrida’s comments reflect, the more stringent the form that these measures take, the

less it is possible to extend true hospitality, to apply both its Law and its laws.

For Derrida, hospitality was not only an ethical question, but an experience that

was so “thoroughly coextensive with ethics” that any attempt to distinguish between the

two would be tautologous.”564 Hospitality, he argued, is a question of “an ethos, that is,

the residence, one’s home, the familiar place of one’s dwelling, inasmuch as it is a

manner of being there, the manner in which we relate to ourselves and to others.”565 One

may not, therefore, “speak of cultivating an ethic of hospitality,” because “despite all the

tensions or contradictions which distinguish it, and despite all the perversions that can

befall it […] hospitality is culture itself and not simply one ethic amongst others.”566

Hospitality, as the relationship of the self “chez-soi” (at home), to others as cohabitants,

guests, or foreigners—as dwelling with others in one’s home—consequently “supposes a

reception or inclusion of the other which one seeks to appropriate, control, and master

according to the different modalities of violence.”567

Deconstruc t ive Hospi ta l i ty

Derrida’s theory of hospitality drew principally from the work of Massignon,

Lévinas, and Kant.568 Like Massignon, Derrida evoked the ideal of universal hospitality as

providing an opportunity for cohabitation and mutual acceptance among Christians,

Muslims, and Jews. However, as Kearns explains, “The evident necessity for and at the

same time the apparent impossibility of hospitality toward the ‘other,’ whether the

                                                                                                               564 Ibid., 16-17. 565 Ibid. 566 Ibid. 16-17.  567 Ibid., 32.

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otherness in question be one of belief, gender, or ethnicity,” reveals Abrahamic

hospitality to be “a two-edged sword from the start.”569 The effort to reveal this

“aporetic nature” of hospitality was part and parcel of Derrida’s broader deconstructive

project, which, in its later iterations especially, aimed to expose the aporia of “classic

religious values” such as “faith, love, the gift, [and] forgiveness.”570

Conceived in terms of legal inclusion or exclusion on the basis of religious,

ethnic, or gender identity, the political question of hospitality invokes related

considerations about Derrida’s ambivalent, and often painful, experience of cultural and

national identity during his childhood in Algeria. Asked about the personal effects of the

Vichy’s anti-Semitic measures in a 1998 interview for Cardozo Life, Derrida explained the

impact of this juridical event on the formation of his political consciousness. “Perhaps

one of the many things that made me sensitive to law is that I belonged to a minority in

a colonized country,” he responded:

My family lost its citizenship, which is a legal event. Even when you’re a child,

you understand what it means to lose your citizenship. When you’re in such a

marginal and unsafe and shaky situation you are more attentive to the

question of legal authorization. You are a subject whose identity is threatened

as are your rights.571

The ever-possible perversion of the law of Hospitality was therefore a fact that had

asserted itself painfully within Derrida’s life. The precariousness of Derrida’s

citizenship—of his “right” to belong as French—revealed the tension between the

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           568 See Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart, eds. Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (Routledge, 2004). 569 Kearns, “Derrida’s Reading of Massignon,” 74. 570 Kearns, “Derrida’s reading of Massignon,” 76. 571 Jacques Derrida, interview with Michel Rosenfeld.

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ethical law of Hospitality, as a universal imperative to accept the Other into one’s home,

and the politically-determined laws of hospitality (as immigration, asylum, citizenship,

etc.) that delimit the arbitrary social and historical conditions under which one does so.

The massive failure of hospitality that resulted from the Vichy regime’s

revocation of the Crémieux decree thus played an important role in shaping Derrida’s

understanding of the concept. However, as Derrida’s close friend and literary

collaborator Hélène Cixous remarks, the hospitality extended to him by the Arab

population in Algeria also contributed significantly to Derrida’s thinking on the topic.

She describes Derrida’s nostalgia for the genuine hospitality (here in the colloquial sense

of the term) that he perceived as an exceptional feature of Algeria’s Islamic culture:

[The black years were] the troubled and turbulent time of texts of

vigilant friendship such as Parti pris pour l’Algérie (Taking a Stand for

Algeria) [and] of his great seminars on l’Hospitalité, or as he would say,

l’Hostipitalité. The epigraphs of those seminars remind us of this feature

specific to Islam, the duty of Hospitality. Philosophy and recent memory

form an alliance here, for if there is an experience missing from French

culture, it is surely that of Hospitality. And the Algerian children that we

once were retain their nostalgia for the welcoming reception of the

Algerians...572

Derrida’s personal experience of Islamic hospitality led him to think about contemporary

immigration questions in these terms. As he explained to Moustapha Chérif in the mid-

                                                                                                               572 Hélène Cixous, “Celle qui ne se ferme pas,” in Derrida à Alger: Un regard sur le monde (Algiers: Éditions Barzakh, 2008), 52. “C’est le temps, aussi, naturellement, des grands séminaires sur l’Hospitalité, ou, comme il dit, l’Hostipitalité. Les exergues de ces séminaires rappellent ce trait si spécifique à l’Islam du devoir de l’Hospitalité. La philosophie et le souvenir présent font alliance ici car s’il y a une expérience absente à la culture française c’est bien l’Hospitalité. Et les enfants d’Algérie que nous étions ont en eux la nostalgie de l’accueil des algériens...” (ibid.).  

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1990s, returning to visit Algeria as an adult made him feel “as though I still were

receiving hospitality, but ‘in my own home,’ [...] and I would like to believe that this is

not the worst way of inhabiting Algerian politics today.”573

As Simon Critchney and Richard Kearney explain in the preface to Derrida’s On

Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, in deconstructive cosmopolitanism there is, “on the one

hand, [...] an unconditional hospitality which should offer the right of refuge to all

immigrants and newcomers. But on the other hand, hospitality has to be conditional:

there has to be some limitation on rights of residence.”574 This constitutive contradiction

within the concept of hospitality means, as Chritchney and Kearney explain, that “all the

political difficulty of immigration consists in negotiating between these two

imperatives.”575 This “double or contradictory imperative,” which troubles every attempt

at enacting hospitality politically, became manifestly apparent to Derrida during the crisis

of political asylum that coincided with the Black Decade.576 The imbrication of these two

events—in which the republic’s colonial past, and its present role in the Algerian conflict,

heightened France’s responsibility to offer asylum to innocent Algerians—pointed

Derrida directly toward this “contradictory logic” within the concept of hospitality.

Considered in relation to these theoretical formulations, Derrida’s participation

in the CISIA’s campaign of civil resistance was born of the recognition that the ideal of

unconditional hospitality, while impossible, was to be strived for nonetheless. As

                                                                                                               573 Derrida, correspondence with Metref. “Je suis tourné vers l’Algérie de façon bien étrange, c’est vrai : comme si j’y recevais encore l’hospitalité, mais ‘chez moi’ (c’est ainsi que des amis algériens m’ont reçu plus d’une fois quand je suis revenu à El-Biar, dans la maison de mon enfance) et, je voudrais le croire, ce n’est pas la plus mauvaise manière d’habiter la politique algérienne aujourd’hui” (ibid.). 574 Critchney and Kearney, preface to On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, x. 575 Ibid.

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Chritchney and Kearney put it, “Derrida’s recognition of a contradictory logic at the

heart of the concept of hospitality is not staged in order to paralyze political action, but,

on the contrary, to enable it.”577 In the Algerian case, this required taking inspiration

from welcoming spirit embodied in the culture of the guests themselves. On the basis of

this particular conception of hospitality, Derrida worked with the CISIA not only to

obtain legal recognition for foreigners in France, but to make French society more

hospitable to the foreigners it welcomed onto its soil. This meant not only “refusing the

isolation of the Algerian people that the assassination of foreigners aims to establish, but

also actively [combatting] the development of anti-Maghrebi racism” by exercising

“continued vigilance with regard to any utilization of the Algerian situation to reinforce a

law-and-order ideology in France.”578

As we have seen, hospitality, for Derrida, requires a negotiation between the

conditional and the unconditional—between the specific laws that delimit the conditions

of immigration and the ethical Law that makes an imperative of welcoming foreigners

unconditionally. As he saw it, “cosmopolitanism may look like the impossible,” because

to enact hospitality through politics (to inscribe it in law) is to risk transgressing the

unconditional Law of hospitality that makes such juridical laws a moral imperative.579

Nevertheless, as Derrida’s actions with the CISIA illustrate, this imperative serves as a

call to action, demanding vigilant attention to the demands of the universal law, so as to

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           576 Ibid. 577 Ibid. 578 CISIA, “Appel pour la paix civile en Algérie.” “Cela implique de ne pas accepter l’isolement du peuple algérien que visent à instaurer les assassinats d’étrangers, mais aussi de combattre activement le développement d’un racisme anti-maghrébin en France. Il importe notamment de rester vigilants à l’égard de toute utilisation de la situation algérienne pour renforcer l’idéologie sécuritaire en France” (ibid.). 579 Derrida, Of Hospitality, 75.

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guard, to the greatest extent possible, against its constitutive but contradictory perversion

through racist, exclusionary, or xenophobic practices.

An International Appeal

The Black Decade’s effects were felt on French soil through the influx of

Algerian refugees, whose unmet demands for political asylum called into question

France’s policies toward and treatment of foreigners; its responsibilities to the Algerian

government and people; and the extent and conditions of the republican commitment to

the defense of universal human rights. These questions, the CISIA’s members believed,

reaffirmed the international character of the Algerian crisis, one in which intellectuals the

world over were implicated, but toward which French intellectuals felt they had

particular responsibilities. It was, therefore, in the multivalent sense of “we”—as

intellectuals and as global citizens—that the CISIA argued, in a 1993 press release

entitled Appel pour la paix civile en Algérie (“A Call for Civil Peace in Algeria”): “The

Algerians’ emergency is also our own.” 580

The Appel pointed to the economic dimensions of the Algerian crisis as the

clearest evidence of its international character. In it, the CISIA argued that “economic

tragedy, and the suffering to which it leads, often find expression on the ideological and

religious terrains, and may feed into strategies of manipulation or provocation.581 The

“demographic and economic” disasters plaguing Algerian society, such as “the

                                                                                                               580 CISIA, “Appel pour la paix civile en Algérie.” “L’urgence des Algériens est aussi la nôtre.” 581 CISIA, “Appel pour la paix civile en Algérie.” “Le drame économique et les souffrances qu’il entraine trouvent une expression sur le terrain idéologique et religieux et peut nourrir des stratégies de manipulation ou de provocation.”

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population pyramid, unemployment, pauperization, [and] chaotic urbanization,” offered,

as Derrida said, “the most fertile ground for all the hardships Algeria is experiencing, and

for certain parties to take advantage of them.” 582 Given this situation, the CISIA

collectively argued that “the governments of economically hegemonic States” were

responsible for addressing the problem of Algeria’s foreign debt “on the international

level,” so as to deliver the Algerian people from “the death grips of economic

constraint.”583

Alger ia ’s Democrat i c Demands

Within the Appel, the members of the Committee presented their assessment of

the Algerian crisis and explained the role they conceived for themselves in encouraging

its resolution.584 They began by stating,

It is the sole responsibility of the Algerian people to provide political

solutions to the crisis that Algeria is undergoing today. These solutions,

however, cannot emerge from the country’s isolation. We all recognize the

complexity of the situation: analyses from diverse points of view express

                                                                                                               582 Derrida, correspondence with Metref. “[L]e désastre démographico-économique (pyramide de la population, chômage, paupérisation, urbanisation chaotique, etc.) offre le terrain le plus propice à toutes les preuves que traverse l’Algérie, comme à toutes les exploitations que certains peuvent en faire.” 583 CISIA, “Appel pour la paix civile en Algérie.” “Mais un des facteurs déterminants de leur aggravation réside dans l’étranglement du pays par la contrainte financière : situation qui impose des responsabilités particulières aux gouvernements des Etats économiquement hégémoniques.” 584 Ibid. It is worth noting that the title of this press release echoes Camus’ 1956 “Appel pour une trêve civile en Algérie" (“Call for a Civil Truce in Algeria”). The former is jointly signed by the CISIA and the Ligue des droits de l’homme (Human Rights League): Adonis, Étienne Balibar, Jamel Eddine Bencheikh, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Juan Goytisolo, Jurgen Habermas, Mohamed Harbi, Francis Jeanson, Georges Labica, Jean Leca, Gustave Massiah, Madeleine Reberioux, Abraham Serfaty, Jean-Pierre Vernant.

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legitimate ideas about its origins and developments. We can agree,

nonetheless, on certain points of principle.”585

The CISIA’s members held, above all, that there could be “none other than a civil

solution” to the Algerian crisis.586 Resorting to violence and repression, they warned,

could “do nothing but ruin the possibilities now at Algeria’s disposal for constructing its

own democracy and the conditions for its economic development.” 587 Thus

acknowledging that conflicting perspectives were both possible and valid, the CISIA’s

members agreed and affirmed that “the universal condemnation of practices of terrorism

and repression would begin to clear a space for the confrontation of the analyses of

various individuals, with respect for the differences of opinion among them.”588

To this end, the press release announces the CISIA’s intention to hold a public

meeting, jointly organized by the CISIA and the Ligue des droits de l’homme (French

Human Rights League), “assembling intellectuals, non-governmental organizations, and

human rights groups,” on February 7, 1994 in the Grand Amphitheater at the

                                                                                                               585 CISIA, “Appel pour la paix civile en Algérie.” “À la crise que traverse aujourd’hui l’Algérie, il appartient aux seuls Algériens d’apporter des solutions politiques. Celles-ci, pourtant, ne peuvent naître de l’isolement du pays. Chacun reconnaît la complexité de la situation : des analyses de points de vue divers s’expriment légitimement sur ses origines et ses développements. L’accord peut néanmoins se faire sur quelques points de principe” (ibid.). 586 Ibid. “Avant tout, réaffirmer que toute issue ne peut être que civile” (ibid.). 587 Ibid. “Le recours à la violence armée pour défendre ou conquérir le pouvoir, le terrorisme, la répression, la pratique de la torture et les exécutions, les assassinats et les enlèvements, les destructions, les menaces contre la vie et la sécurité des personnes, ne peuvent que ruiner les possibilités dont dispose encore l’Algérie pour construire sa propre démocratie et les conditions de son développement économique” (ibid.). 588 Ibid. “C’est la condamnation par tous des pratiques de terrorisme et de répression qui commencera ainsi de dégager un espace pour la confrontation des analyses de chacun, dans le respect des divergences” (ibid.).

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Sorbonne.589 The aims of this gathering, the press release explains, were “[to expose] the

various forms of violence that Algeria is undergoing, [to discuss] their meanings, and [to

evaluate] their consequences.”590 Following this opportunity also to debate the proper

course of action, the CISIA planned “immediately to impose initiatives to alert public

opinion to the Algerian tragedy, to underline the responsibilities of governments and

international financial institutions, and to develop widespread support for Algeria’s

democratic demands.”591

Inte l l e c tuals at Stake

The “terrorisme intellecticide” that overtook Algeria in the early 1990s resulted from

tensions that first arose under colonial rule and intensified during the postcolonial period.

As Clement Moore Henry explains, Algerian civil society “in the sense of relatively

autonomous associations [had] flourished only briefly after independence.” 592 FLN

leaders, deriving their legitimacy from the historic legacy of the party’s leadership and

from the socioeconomic advances promised by an “authentic” socialism, exerted nearly

complete control over Algerian society in the years following the revolution.593 Under

Boumediene,

                                                                                                               589 The French cartoonist Siné illustrated a flyer for this event, which highlights the connection that the CISIA perceived between the war of liberation and the violence of the Black Decade [see back matter]. 590 CISIA, “Appel pour la paix civile en Algérie.” “[Cet réunion publique] devrait permettre un exposé des différentes formes de violence que subit aujourd’hui l’Algérie, une discussion de leur signification et une évaluation de leurs conséquences.” 591 CISIA, “Appel pour la paix civile en Algérie.” “Des initiatives s’imposent sans retard pour sensibiliser l’opinion au drame algérien, souligner la responsabilité des gouvernements et des institutions financières internationales, développer le soutien de tous à l’exigence démocratique algérienne.” 592 Clement Moore Henry, “Postcolonial Dialectics of Civil Society,” in North Africa in Transition: State, Society, and Economic Transformation in the 1990s, ed. Yahia H. Zoubir (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1999), 16. 593 Layachi, “Algeria,” 174.

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Challengers of governmental policies were either jailed or sent into exile;

independent civic and professional associations, student organizations, and

unions were either disbanded, put under state control via the ruling party, or

coopted. The National Assembly was suspended; the media was under strict

state control; and, in the cultural sphere, the state controlled the mosques

and appointed preachers and used both to promote its societal plan and

justify its policies.594

In a context of such strict political and cultural repression, Algerian intellectuals were

either “co-opted into the complex set of state bureaucracies or isolated in other ways

from potential readerships or followings.”595

This isolation mainly affected Algeria’s francophone intellectuals, and produced

disastrous consequences for them during the Black Decade. Problematizing the

phenomenon he describes as “Algeria [becoming] indifferent to the murder of its

intellectuals,”596 Lahouari Addi explains that decolonization left the Algerian intelligentsia

sharply divided between francophones and arabophones. 597 The francophone

intellectuals, educated within the French academic system, formed a secular elite that was

“separated off” from the rest of Algerian society, and maligned for its connection to a

colonial legacy that Algerian nationalists actively tried to efface in the years following the

                                                                                                               594 Layachi, “Algeria,” 174. 595 Henry, “Postcolonial Dialectics of Civil Society,” 17. 596 In the novel, Le blanc de l’Algérie, the most famous work of fiction on the subject of the Black Decade, the Algerian writer and historian Assia Djebar provides a fictionalized account of the phenomenon Addi describes. In the last pages of the book, Djebar provides a brief list of Algerian intellectuals who lost their lives in the violence; these include poets, playwrights, musicians, teachers, and sociologists assassinated in and around Algiers between 1993 and 1994. In addition to depicting, with great historical accuracy, the wave of murders and death threats that fell over the country at this time, Djebar’s novel gives a sense of how the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, in the absence of civil society, allowed the situation in Algeria to become so dire that intellectuals were assassinated almost daily, while the public looked on in silence. See Assia Djebar, Le blanc de l’Algérie (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1995), 248.

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revolution. 598 In contrast, the greater population identified with the arabophone

intellectuals, who therefore enjoyed a significant influence over public opinion.599

Speaking in 1997 before an assembly at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Bourdieu

recalled having foreseen this divide, and its dangers, while he was still a researcher in

Algiers:

I was conscious of the potential conflicts contained within the linguistic

division of Algeria, especially with the opposition between the francophones

and arabophones which, [although] temporarily eclipsed by the unifying logic

of the anticolonial fight, could not help but manifest itself [eventually].600

As Addi explains, once the anticolonial battle was won, the francophone and Arabic-

speaking intellectuals’ held divergent views on postcolonial development; the

marginalized francophones favored a strong State as the means to resolve the economic

and social problems that independent Algeria faced, while the arabophone intellectuals

“wanted to invigorate the country’s language and religion in order to revive its Arab-

Islamic cultural heritage.”601

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           597 Addi, “Algeria and the Dual Image of the Intellectual,” 91. 598 Lahouari Addi, “Algeria and the Dual Image of the Intellectual,” in Intellectuals in Politics, ed. Jeremy Jennings and Anthony Kemp Welch (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), 89. Following liberation, FLN leaders implemented a series of “incoherent” and “ill-conceived” policies intended to promote the Arabic language and Islamic faith. This “arabization” movement included measures to import foreign teachers, a policy that was accelerated under Boumediene. As Stone notes, this policy, which alienated the youth from “the older generation who had been brought up in the francophone tradition [...] unintentionally fuelled the early growth of political Islam and the FIS” in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Stone, Agony of Algeria, 19). 599 Addi, “Algeria and the Dual Image of the Intellectual,” 89. 600 Bourdieu, “Entre amis,” n.p. “J’étais aussi consciente des conflits potentiels qu’enfermait la division linguistique de l’Algérie, avec en particulier l’opposition entre les arabophones et les francophones qui, momentanément occultée par la logique unificatrice de la lutte anticolonialiste, ne pouvait manquer de se manifester.” 601 Addi, “Algeria and the Dual Image of the Intellectual,” 92-93.

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The violence that broke out following Algeria’s failed democratic elections

“brought into stark confrontation the state, supported by the army, and the Islamists,

enthused by their electoral victory.”602 In this polarized context, “those social groups at

the periphery of the state—doctors, journalists, technical specialists, French-speaking

teachers—in short, all those in Algeria that are called intellectuals—had to decide which

side they were on.”603 Although they hesitated to support the army, these intellectuals

made their hostility toward the Islamists explicit, and consequently became the targets of

systematic killings at the hands of the FIS.604 The FIS exhibited particular enmity for the

francophone journalists they thought to be “the vanguard of the secularist trend,” and

for psychiatrists and psychologists, whose professions they considered “un-Islamic.”605

The isolation of francophone intellectuals caused the majority of Algerians to

look on in silence as the former “were killed like rabbits” during the Black Decade. 606

As Addi argues, secularism was the primary source of the “mutual incomprehension”

between the francophone intellectuals and the Algerian populace, which expressed its

desire for democracy in religious terms. 607 Much as Bourdieu had observed in

revolutionary Algeria, the Algerian population in the 1990s wished for a political

                                                                                                               602 Ibid., 98. 603 Ibid. 604 Ibid. The francophone intellectuals’ reluctance to pick a side in the conflict created some ambiguity about the perpetrators of the murders of intellectuals, which had become a common occurrence in Algeria by 1993 (ibid.). 605 Stone, Agony of Algeria, 193-194. By mid-1995, more than forty Algerian journalists had lost their lives.. Many more were the targets of religious fatwahs threatening them with death. Interestingly, the assassination of intellectuals by extremists was not without precedent in Algeria; it had in fact been used as a tactic in the pro-colonial struggle during the French-Algerian War, when the OAS, a group of renegade defectors from the French army, targeted a number of individual intellectuals and intellectual institutions, especially newspapers and publishing houses (Sirinelli, “Guerre d’Algérie,” 24). 606 Addi, “Algeria and the Dual Image of the Intellectual,” 98. 607 Ibid., 97.

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overhaul that would not entail a complete departure from cultural tradition; as Addi

described at this time, “The majority of the population want to change the personnel of

the political regime without putting into question the collective and symbolic forms

inherited from the past.”608

By voting for the FIS, Addi argues, the Algerians had expressed their desire for a

modern democracy, accessed through and articulated in terms of an Islamic cultural

identity.609 He writes,

The popularity of the FIS rests upon democratic demands that relate to

participation in the world of politics from which Algerians are excluded, and

that also relate to participation in the world of social modernity through such

things as work, housing, the facilities associated with urban life, being treated

with dignity by the administrative machinery of the state. [...] There is

therefore a deep democratic impetus in the protests of the Islamists, but it is

a protest which does not express itself in the normal words and language of

democracy.610

Thus, by refusing to “give an important place to religion in its political discourse,” the

francophone elite further alienated itself from the Algerian mainstream.611 Addi argues

that this widespread suspicion toward an ideology of democracy expressed in secular

terms—and in the language of the former colonizer—was an important factor in the

public’s indifference to the FIS’s killing of intellectuals en masse.612

Secular ism and Civi l Soc i e ty

Writing in the midst of the Black Decade, Addi concluded that the lack of a

receptive audience for the francophone intellectuals’ work diminished their political and

                                                                                                               608 Ibid., 100. 609 Ibid., 97. 610 Ibid. 611 Ibid.

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professional credibility, rendering them socially isolated and therefore highly vulnerable

to the FIS’s campaign of anti-intellectual violence. “Emerging independently of the State,”

Addi suggested, the francophone elite “could have provided an alternative to the

language of religion, or at least limited its hegemonic influence over a society which, in

order to show its distrust of government, took refuge in the politics of Islam.”613

Addi traces the isolation of Algeria’s francophone intellectuals to “the existence

of a political domain [...] dominated in a coercive and non-ideological manner by the

power of the State, which itself is in the hands of the army.”614 With the Algerian

educational system thus subordinated to the power of the state, even universities lacked

“administrative autonomy,” and faced government censorship of research subjects and

publications.615 Because intellectual autonomy was seen as a threat to the authority of the

State, the result was the absence of a civil elite with any meaningful social recognition or

influence over public opinion.616 Evoking the vision of the intellectual that emerged from

the Dreyfus Affair, Addi writes, “The force of the intellectual derives from his ability to

influence public opinion;” in the absence of public opinion, or its expression in civil

society, “the intellectual remains the individual respected in his neighborhood for his

social status—doctor, journalist, lawyer, university lecturer, and so on—and not as a

political actor who influences public debate in the direction of modernity.”617

The challenge of defending the secular Algerian intellectuals was therefore to

break the isolation that this political situation imposed, and in doing so, to redeem the

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           612 Ibid. 613 Ibid., 98. 614 Ibid., 99. 615 Ibid. 616 Ibid.

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intellectual’s role as a mediator and activist in public life. To this end, the CISIA

advanced a vision of the intellectual as necessarily engaged in the political realm. This

vision, however, introduced important innovations on the classic requisite of manifesting

one’s dissent. Breaking from the tradition of petitioners from Zola to Sartre, the CISIA

specified that the intellectual “should join action with speech—without interrupting the

discussion, that is without depriving the other of speech.”618 Conceived in this way, the

full role of the intellectual was not simply to “have the last word,” but rather to

participate actively in “critical analysis” within a variety of domains: “on the theoretical

plane, through research, in universities, laboratories, and studios, but also in a practical

and largely public fashion, through discourse, works, and interventions.”619

The intellectual’s capacity to function in the role that the CISIA set out

depended on the existence of a public sphere in which universal human rights were

guaranteed full protection. The CISIA therefore reaffirmed the “indivisibility” of human

rights, arguing that “respect for the physical and moral integrity of the individual” was

inseparable from “the right to free political expression—insofar as it respects the life and

liberty of others—through opinions, language, and religion.” 620 As the FIS-led

fundamentalist movement illustrated, the absence of free political expression posed a

threat not only to the intellectual’s right to engage in critical expression, but also to his

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           617 Ibid., 100. 618 Derrida, correspondence with Metref. “On doit pouvoir agir – en prenant la parole, en joignant l’acte à la parole – sans interrompre la discussion, c’est-à-dire sans prendre la parole à l’autre. Ni la parole ni la vie” (ibid.). 619 Ibid. “[D]es lieux depuis lesquels l’analyse critique peut s’exercer : sur le plan théorique, par la recherche, dans les universités, les laboratoires, les ateliers, mais aussi bien de façon pratique et largement publique par les discours, les œuvres, des interventions...” (ibid.).

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physical existence. The submission of Algerian society to a state of terror and “complicit

silence” during the Black Decade—affected both concretely and symbolically through

the mass elimination of intellectuals—made it impossible to uphold these rights.621

The CISIA’s members were careful to specify that this threat was not exclusive

to Algeria, nor was it a problem posed specifically by Islam in general or by its

fundamentalist or radical interpretations.622 Instead, the danger of religious repression

reflected universal concerns. It was therefore essential, they argued, “to recognize the

international character of the ‘religious problem,’ of the relationships between State, civil

society, and religious authority in general. This problem presents itself in numerous

countries, and, within each country, the forces in the conflict are largely international

ones.”623 Thus, although CISIA’s charter held that “Islam is not, by nature, incompatible

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           620 CISIA, “Charte du CISIA.” “Respect de l’intégrité physique et morale, droit à la libre expression politique—pour autant qu’elle respecte la liberté d’autrui—qu’elles soient les opinions, la langue, la religion” (ibid.). 621 CISIA, “Charte du CISIA.” “Cette position ne peut s’accomoder d’un silence complice” (ibid.). The “Algerian white,” to Djebar refers in Le blanc d’Algérie, symbolizes the “complicit silence” that shrouds the deaths of Algerian intellectuals by obscuring reason and prohibiting speech (see Djebar, Le blanc d’Algérie). 622 Derrida, correspondence with Metref. “Avec des différences qu’il faut aussi respecter, certes, et compte tenu d’une histoire complexe qui a plus que trente ans d’âge, ce problème du théologico-politique ne se pose pas seulement en Algérie et pas seulement quant à l’Islam et aux interprétations ‘fondamentalistes’ ou ‘intégristes,’ d’ailleurs elles-mêmes diverses et contradictoires, de tel ou tel héritage religieux” (ibid.). 623 Ibid. “Cette ‘internationalité’ n’efface pas l’histoire propre de l’Algérie, ses liens d’affinité, de proximité, etc. et donc de la coresponsabilité avec tels ou tels autres pays. On doit reconnaître aussi un caractère international au problème ‘religieux,’ aux rapports entre l’Etat, la société civile et l’autorité religieuse en général. Ce problème se pose dans bien des pays, et, à l’intérieur de chaque pays, les forces qui luttent sont déjà largement internationales” (ibid.).

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with a lawful state,”624 they maintained that the separation between politics and religion

“always appears the best guarantee of tolerance.”625

In its insistence on “the total separation of politics and religion,” in Algeria as in

every country that aspires to liberal democracy, the CISIA’s position on secularism was

directly in line with the French republican model. Secularism, they argued, was the best

way of assuring full freedom of expression and the autonomy of cultural activity. Derrida,

as we have seen, drew heavily from religious themes within his philosophical thought,

and carried on a close but ambivalent relationship to his own religious heritage; it is

telling, therefore, to consider that Derrida understood secularism as not only a political

liberty, but a religious one, which allowed a society “to enrich [...], to vitalize, to

differentiate, and to pluralize the study, the memory, and the interpretation of the

religious tradition, especially for those who adhere to it.”626

Democracy to Come

The CISIA’s insistence on the complete separation of politics from religion

should also be interpreted in light of Derrida’s reflections on democracy from the early

1990s, the era in which he published Specters of Marx. Derrida conceived of democracy as

a perpetually unrealized—because perfectible—system of government, which cannot

possibility exist in the absence of critical, creative, and free expression. In opposition to

all other political regimes, Derrida held, democracy “is the only system [...] that accepts

                                                                                                               624 Ibid.; see also CISIA, “Charte du CISIA.” 625 Derrida, correspondence with Metref. “La séparation entre le politique et le religieux paraît toujours la meilleure garantie de tolérance...” (ibid.). 626 Ibid. “La séparation entre le politique et le religieux paraît toujours la meilleure garantie de tolérance, et d’abord pour l’exercice même de la foi et du culture, pour les enrichir, pour vitaliser, différencier, pluraliser l’étude, la mémoire et l’interprétation de la tradition religieuse, en particulier par ceux qui tiennent à elle” (ibid.).

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its own historicity, that is, its own future, which accepts its self-criticism, which accepts

its perfectibility.”627 Therefore, he argued, “one recognizes a democracy [by] the right to

say everything, the right to criticize the allegation, or the so-called democracy, in the

name of a democracy to come.”628

Discussing the CISIA’s project, Derrida argued that the intellectual’s political role

was directly tied to this vision of democracy as a system that “accepts its self-criticism,”

that welcomes intervention, and that gives place to the forces of its own transformation.

It was the responsibility of the intellectual, he argued, to actualize this vision of

democracy by defending democratic values wherever they were threatened. “Political

responsibility” toward Algeria, he argued, “requires not accepting [the basic fact of the

present conflict] as a natural and unchangeable reality. It consists, instead, of

demonstrating, both in words and in practice, that this is not the case; that democratic

solutions are possible, that their strength and support lie elsewhere.”629

The “elsewhere” in which Algeria’s democratic solutions were to be fond was at

once international and domestic. The international sense is more apparent, as it spoke to

the very existence and goals of the CISIA’s work. Within Algeria, locating this

“elsewhere” required recognizing, as Derrida put it, that most Algerians “were on the

side of reason, of the rational, of the reasonable,” but were excluded from public

                                                                                                               627 Derrida quoted in Chérif, Islam and the West, 43. 628 Ibid. 629 Derrida, “Parti pris pour l’Algérie,” Les Temps Modernes 580, January-February 1995: 236. “[L]a responsabilité politique consiste aujourd’hui à ne pas accepter [la donnée fondamentale de l’affrontement actuel] comme un fait naturel et indéplaçable. Elle consiste à démontrer, en le disant et en le mettant en pratique, qu’il n’en est rien et que le recours démocratique a son lieu et ses forces et son peuple ailleurs” (ibid.).

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discourse, stripped of the right to free political speech.630 Most often, this exclusion

occurred not due to censure or death threats, but to the fact that the majority of the

population “did not recognize itself in the prevailing discourse of the two adversaries,”

the State and the FIS.631 The francophone intellectuals, who alone had articulated their

demands for democracy in secular terms—who “wished to speak,” as Derrida put it, “in

the voice of reason”—therefore represented the greatest hope for Algerian liberal

democracy. 632 Having observed, through Algerian decolonization, the “theoretical

damage” of imposing ideological leadership from without, the CISIA wished to defend

reason on the side of the Algerians, by offering refuge to those who embodied this hope, and

who would otherwise fall prey to the most severe measures of repression.633

The New Intellectual International

Bourdieu and Derrida’s actions, as guiding members of the CISIA, reflect a

greater shift in the intellectual’s relationship to politics, which took on an increasingly

collective and international character as the twentieth century progressed. No longer

content with the pretention to “universal subject[ivity]” that had imbued intellectuals,

                                                                                                               630 Derrida, correspondence with Metref. “Des Algériens et des Algériennes dont la douleur est réduite au silence, de ceux et de celle qui sont, certes, du côté de la raison, du rationnel et du raisonnable (raisons de vivre et vie de la raison), mais sont privés du discours, du droit à la parole” (ibid.). 631 Derrida, correspondence with Metref. “Ils en sont privés de plusieurs façons : tantôt et le plus souvent, car je suppose que c’est la majorité des cas, parce qu’ils ne se reconnaissent pas dans les discours les plus bruyants des deux adversaires qui occupent le devant de la scène (l’Etat et le Fis)...” (ibid.). 632 Derrida, correspondence with Metref. “[C]eux qui voudraient faire entendre la voix de la raison” (ibid.). 633 Derrida, correspondence with Metref. “[T]antôt enfin parce que (énorme problème que je ne peux que désigner sommairement) les insuffisances multiples de l’éducation, avec toutes ses racines, qui ne sont pas seulement démographiques, privent tant d’Algériens et d’Algériennes de ressources de la parole publique” (ibid.).

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from Zola to Sartre, with the authority to speak out “in defiance of established powers,”

French intellectuals in the 1990s were challenged to develop new modes of engagement

that decentered the primacy of the Western subject, while giving place to new

international alliances capable of defending universal interests.634 For Bourdieu, this

meant recognizing that although intellectuals are not “the spokesmen of the universal,

even less of a ‘universal class,’” they nonetheless share “an interest in the universal.”635

As Loïc Wacqant explains, this recognition inspired Bourdieu’s “commitment to the

‘corporatism of the universal,’” which Bourdieu “amply manifested” through “tireless

efforts to disseminate the instruments of critical thought, and to create a ‘collective

intellectual’ capable of advancing a transnational Realpolitik of reason.”636

French Inst i tut ional Set t ings

France was one of many countries, in the 1950s and 1960s, that came to view

education as an essential tool for building the “new world,” and no longer as a realm

reserved for the social élite. 637 Modern French society held a broadened view of

education as “a process of social advancement, professional training, and personal

development” for the masses, and the growing number of students in the French

educational system necessitated structural changes to the system itself.638 As institutions

adapted, “new courses were designed and implemented, new staff recruited, [and] new

educational institutions established.”639

                                                                                                               634 Jennings, “Dilemmas of the Intellectual,” 80. 635 Ibid., 79. 636 Wacquant, “Sociological Life of Pierre Bourdieu” 550. 637 Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 17. 638 Ibid. 639 Ibid.  

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The Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), where Derrida

taught at the time of the CISIA’s formation, was a product of this modernization of

French academic life.640 Founded as an offshoot of the École Pratique des Hautes

Études in 1975, the EHESS represents a greater move toward the “democratization” and

“diversification” of Parisian academic institutions in the latter half of the twentieth

century, and its educational project reflects a broadening of horizons within French

scholarship.641 From its inception, the EHESS allowed scholars such as Derrida and

Bourdieu the advantage of a flexible, “new-style institutional base for [their] work.”642

These trends led to the creation of “a new style of [French] intellectual,” who diverged

from the confines of “classical disciplines” and who transgressed “the traditional lines of

academic succession.”643

Foucaul t ’ s “Spec i f i c” and Bourdieu’s “Col l e c t ive” Inte l l e c tual

Bourdieu’s view of the intellectual’s political responsibility shifted over the

course of his career. As a young sociologist, he disavowed the political role of the

intellectual, holding in particular contempt those intellectuals—typically sociologists—

who pretentiously “sought to change the world,” but who held an unrealistic view of

their profession.644 These intellectuals, he believed, did “not know how to distinguish

between what is strategy coming from the necessity of the moment, and what is personal

investment.”645

                                                                                                               640 Ibid.; see also Bourdieu et al., “Assez !” 641 Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 18. 642 Ibid., 17. Bourdieu held a position as Director of Studies at the EPHE beginning in 1964 (ibid., 8.). 643 Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 17. 644 Bourdieu quoted in Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu, 23. 645 Ibid.

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Over the course of his career, however, Bourdieu came to terms with the

fundamentally political character of the sociological discipline. As he argues in Sociology is

a Martial Art, an anthology of his political writings:

I have always known—without always being able to say it aloud, for fear

of gratuitously excluding myself from the “scientific community,” then

dominated by the ideology of “axiological neutrality”—that sociology is

through and through political. This does not mean—far from it—that it is

inspired by political postulates or that it abdicates all scientific demands in

order to advance political causes. I have always been convinced that the

most valuable contribution a researcher can make to the political struggle

is to work, with all the weapons that science offers in the moment in

question, to produce and promote truth.646

Bourdieu’s vision of intellectual engagement, grounded in the notion that the most

important political contributions occur within the properly scientific domain, speaks to

the changes that occurred in French political culture over the course of the late twentieth

century. In formulating this vision, Bourdieu took direct inspiration from the

Foucauldian model of the “specific intellectual.”

For Michel Foucault, the social uprising of May 1968 signaled a decisive shift

away from the Sartrean ideal of the “intellectuel engagé,” a vision of the intellectual as

the elevator of the masses, “the clear, individual figure of a universality whose obscure,

collective form is embodied in the proletariat.”647 In the years that followed the 1968

insurrection, Foucault developed a modern definition of political responsibility.

According to this new definition, the intellectual’s political role continued to involve

                                                                                                               646 Cite interview in Sociology is a Martial Art, 271. 647 Foucault quoted in Jennings, “Dilemmas of the Intellectual,” 76; see also “Les intellectuels et le pouvoir,” in Foucault, Dits et Écrits, 1954-1988, (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).

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“mak[ing] visible the mechanisms of repressive power which operate in a hidden manner”

to dominate the masses; what changed, however, was that the now did so as a “specialist,”

rather than a “universal prophet.”648 This is not to say, as Jeremy Jennings points out,

that Foucault intended to restrict intellectual activity to the realms of the “professional or

sectoral;” rather, it meant that by “operat[ing] and struggl[ing] at the general level of the

regime of truth which is so essential to the structure and functioning of [...] society,” the

intellectual would enable his work to assume a “general significance” within the “political

economy of truth.”649

Echoing Foucault, Bourdieu argued in 1996 that “the intellectual can no longer

be just a voice of critical conscience, seeking to assert within the political world the

truths and values that prevail in his or her universe. He or she must also bring a general

specific competence into the service of the causes he or she wants to defend.”650 As an

iconoclastic figure in the latter half of the twentieth century, Bourdieu embodied this

conviction by charting a new course of intellectual activity, which emphasized field

research and collaboration among intellectuals outside the confines of the university

system.651 In doing so, he initiated new modes of activism, which used reason as a

practical tool to critique and counteract social injustice.652 Moreover, he worked to foster

an international intellectual community that would engage meaningfully and directly with

the social world across a variety of disciplines and cultural contexts.653

                                                                                                               648 Foucault quoted in Jennings, “Dilemmas of the Intellectual,” 76. 649 Foucault quoted in Jennings, “Dilemmas of the Intellectual,” 76. 650 Bourdieu, Sociology is a Martial Art, 258. 651 See Wacquant, “Sociological Life of Pierre Bourdieu.” 652 Ibid. 653 Jennings, “Dilemmas of the Intellectual,” 79.

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We have seen how, as a philosophy student at the ENS, and later as a budding

ethnographer, Bourdieu came up against an intellectual community that “held the social

world at arm’s length,” while also “attempt[ing] to rejoin [this] world” through the

“irresponsibl[y] utopian” and “irrealistic[ally] radical” political commitments of Stalinism

or Maoism.”654 Bourdieu attributed intellectuals’ “social and mental distance” from social

reality to “the effects of [their] enclosure” within a selective and socially homogenous

scholastic community.655 If there existed an antidote to the “enclosure” that prevented

intellectuals from engaging meaningfully with social causes, Bourdieu believed that it

could be achieved through the formation of a diverse collective of autonomous

intellectuals, who together would serve as a “critical countervailing power.”656

A new definition of the intellectual was therefore at stake for Bourdieu in the

work of the CISIA, which represents one of many active endeavors through which he

worked to incarnate his ideal of a “collective intellectual” that combined “civic

engagement” with “scientific autonomy.”657 Wacquant cites Bourdieu’s work of “guiding

or goading” numerous activist groups of intellectuals, such as the International

Parliament of Writers (founded in 1993) and Raisons d’agir (founded in 1995), as attempts

to foster a collective force “across disciplinary boundaries and national borders.”658

Bourdieu’s aim, Wacquant writes, was “to bring the joined symbolic competencies of

artists and scientists to bear on public debates and to reconstruct a viable progressive

                                                                                                               654 Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-Analysis, 9. 655 Ibid., 9. 656 Jennings, “Dilemmas of the Intellectual,” 80. 657 Wacquant, “Sociological Life of Pierre Bourdieu,” 555-556. Other such efforts included Bourdieu’s work with the Centre de sociologie européen, beginning in the mid-1960s; with Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, from 1975 until his death in 2002; and with the International Parliament of Writers, founded in 1993. 658 Wacquant, “Sociological Life of Pierre Bourdieu,” 556.

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agenda true to the historic ideals of the Left.”659 This, Jennings explains, required keeping

“the most autonomous producers in each field from the temptation of the ivory tower

by creating appropriate institutions available to them to intervene collectively under their

own specific authority.”660 The ideal embodiment of this collective association, which

Bourdieu referred to as an “International of Intellectuals,” would accomplish this by

bringing together “the talents of the ensemble of the specific intellectuals.”661

Unif i ed Soc ia l Sc ience

Although he emphasized the need for interaction and cooperation among

intellectuals of various vocations, Bourdieu considered sociology to possess a particular

redemptive capacity. As Wacquant writes, Bourdieu “believed not only in social science

as a knowledge enterprise, but also in sociology’s capacity to inform a ‘rational

utopianism’ needed to salvage institutions of social justice.”662 The sociologist, Bourdieu

argued, was “a sort of organic intellectual of humanity,” who by applying his specific

“competencies” to analyze particular cases, advanced “a universalism [that was] rooted in

the comprehension of difference.” 663

Bourdieu therefore believed that a unified collective of sociologists could

perform the “public service” of “denaturaliz[ing] and defataliz[ing]” the social world, “by

disclosing the objective causes and the subjective reasons that make people do what they

                                                                                                               659 Ibid. 660  Bourdieu quoted in Jennings, “Dilemmas of the Intellectual,” 79; see also Bourdieu, “Les intellectuels et les pouvoirs,” in Michel Foucault: Une histoire de la vérité (Paris: Syros, 1985), 93-94 and “The Corporatism of the Universal: The Role of Intellectuals in the Modern World,” Telos 81 (Fall 1989), 99-110.  661 Bourdieu quoted in Jennings, “Dilemmas of the Intellectual,” 79. 662 Wacquant, “Sociological Life of Pierre Bourdieu,” 556. 663 Bourdieu, “Entre amis,” n.p. “L’ethno-sociologue est une sorte d’intellectuel organique de l’humanité qui, en tant qu’agent collectif, peut contribuer à dénaturaliser et

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do, be what they are, and feel the way they feel. And to give them thereby the

instruments to master the social unconscious that governs their thoughts and limits their

actions.”664 Just as he undertook his early research on Algeria in order to understand the

causes and consequences of the Algerians’ suffering, and to help them to make the best

decisions about their future, Bourdieu intended his “unified social science” to inform

individuals of the possibilities for action that were available to them, and to “necessitate

conducts” that would produce the best social outcomes.665

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           à défataliser l’existence humaine en mettant sa compétence au service d’un universalisme enraciné dans la compréhension des particularismes” (ibid.). 664 Wacquant, “Sociological Life of Pierre Bourdieu,” 556. 665 Ibid.

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CONCLUSION

Toward a New Internationalism

As Jeremy Jennings notes, the Black Decade presented the members of the

CISIA with pressing concerns about the grounds on which to justify their actions in

defense of their Algerian peers. First, among these questions, was whether “the

autonomy of creative producers [was] grounds enough to secure a new authority for

action.” 666 The answer, for the members of the CISIA, was clear: “By defending

themselves as a whole, they defend[ed] the universal.” 667 “It is for this very reason,”

Derrida reaffirmed, “and not out of cultural elitism or intellectual corporatism,” that the

CISIA committed itself to the project of “tirelessly condemn[ing] acts of murderous

violence when they befall those who represent knowledge, art, and culture, [and

especially] freedom of literary and journalistic expression.”668 Guided, in this sense, by

Bourdieu’s ideal of the “collective intellectual” as a “critical countervailing power”

against “the forces of dogmatism and obscurantism,” the CISIA’s members maintained

that the autonomy of creative producers demanded their vigilant attention.669

                                                                                                               666 Jennings, “Dilemmas of the Intellectual,” 80. 667 Ibid., 79. 668 Derrida, correspondence with Metref. “C’est pour cette raison précise, et non par élitisme culturel ou par corporatisme intellectuel, qu’il faut accuser sans relâche les violences meurtrières quand elles s’acharnent sur ceux et celles qui représentent le savoir, l’art et la culture, la littérature et la presse libres” (ibid.). 669 Jennings, “Dilemmas of the Intellectual,” 80; Derrida, correspondence with Metref. “Ces hommes et ces femmes de parole paraissent insupportables au dogmatisme et à l’obscurantisme, comme à tous ceux qui voudraient exercer un pouvoir à l’abri de toute critique” (Derrida, correspondence with Metref).

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The CISIA’s charter asserted that “this line of thought and action must be

upheld independently of governments, institutions, and parties.”670 This condition of the

CISIA’s work reflects Bourdieu and Derrida’s shared conviction that contemporary

political and intellectual affairs called for the creation of new bonds of autonomous

intellectual association. As Bourdieu stated in his May 1997 address at the Institut du

Monde Arabe, the generation of intellectuals to which he and Derrida belonged

“emerged at the summit of the university institution just as this institution was

crumbling.”671 Rather than attempting to salvage its remains, Bourdieu envisioned the

university’s collapse as an opportunity for the universal dispersion of the tools of critical

analysis. No longer constrained by the effects of “enclosure” within the walls of the

ivory tower, these tools would enable meaningful reflection within and upon the social

world.

Derrida, like Bourdieu, experienced the 1990s as a turbulent period that

destabilized fixed notions of institutional belonging. He explained that “in the

earthquake that rattles our times, we are learning to navigate and to think about borders

differently. All borders (state, nation, nation state, culture, language, religion).”672 For

Derrida, as a member of the CISIA, the seismic events of the Black Decade spoke to the

                                                                                                               670 CISIA, “Charte du CISIA.” “Une telle ligne de pensée et d’action ne peut être tenue que dans une indépendance totale à l’égard des gouvernements, des institutions, des partis. Le CISIA n’accepte d’adhésions qu’à titre individuel, sur la base de la présente Charte.” This insistence on autonomy did not preclude the CISIA from collaborating with other organizations that shared its goals and respected its independence, such as the Ligue des droits de l’homme and Barbaresques, an EHESS association whose purpose was to develop scientific exchange with the Maghreb. 671 Pierre Bourdieu, “Entre amis,” n.p. “Je fais partie d’une génération d’intellectuels qui ont été produits pour occuper le sommet de l’institution universitaire au moment même où cette institution s’écroulait” (ibid.).

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necessity of “re-engaging the philosophical debate” over the relationships between “State,

reason, and religion.”673 Derrida argued, moreover, that this reflection, which the CISIA

worked to facilitate, “could never be purely theoretical; it summons us—it is therefore

already an active intervention.”674

At the demonstration for peace in Algeria that was announced in the CISIA’s

Appel, Derrida responded individually to this call. On February 7, 1994, at the Sorbonne,

he delivered a speech entitled Parti pris pour l’Algérie (Taking A Stand for Algeria), in which

he upheld the CISIA’s core principles, while also outlining his own set of proposals for

meeting Algeria’s democratic demands.675 These, as Baring summarizes, included “the

need to look beyond a closed national solution” to the Algerian crisis; an unconditional

requirement for the “tolerance of cultural difference;” the call for a moderate alternative

to the extremism of the State and FIS, in the form of a “Third Estate;” and finally, an

insistence on the complete “dissociation of the political from the theological.”676 These

proposals, as Baring suggests, closely resemble those Derrida made in his letter to Pierre

Nora; in this sense, Taking a Stand for Algeria illustrates the homologies between the

positions Derrida assumed, with respect to both Algeria and France, at these two crucial

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           672 Derrida, correspondence with Metref. “Dans le tremblement de terre qui secoue notre temps, nous apprenons à penser et à traverser autrement les frontières. Toutes les frontières (État, nation, État-nation, culture, langue, religion)” (ibid.). 673 Derrida, correspondence with Metref. “[I]l faut ré-engager des débats philosophiques et largement ouverts sur cette nouvelle expérience des frontières comme sur les concepts qui fondent le droit international, les rapports entre l’Etat, la raison et la religion” (ibid.). 674 Derrida, correspondence with Metref. “Cette réflexion ne saurait être purement théorique, elle appelle, elle est donc déjà une intervention active” (ibid.). 675 See Jacques Derrida, “Parti pris pour l’Algérie,” Les Temps Modernes 580, January-February 1995, 233-241. 676 Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 260.

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moments in the history of French-Algerian relations.677 In both cases, Derrida made the

case for “an expansion of republican values that would not undergird imperialism.”678

This Living “We”

As Baring’s argument indicates, Derrida shifted uneasily between cultural

identifications over the course of his life, presenting himself, in accounts of his

childhood, as “a black and very Arab Jew;” as a French Algerian (a pieds noir), during the

French-Algerian War; and finally, during the Black Decade, as a Franco-Maghrebian—“a

French citizen who by birth was North African, an Algerian in France.”679 As such terms

indicate, Derrida’s national identifications positioned him as at once a guest and a host

within Europe—French by birth, and yet also a foreigner. The mutlivalence of Derrida’s

cultural identity should, therefore, be brought to bear on his role as a French

philosopher, whose North African origins compelled him to work toward a cultural and

intellectual rapprochement of Algeria and France many years after their turbulent separation.

Even toward the end of a career that had established him as one of the most

influential European philosophers of the twentieth century, Derrida retained a strong

sense of Algerian appartenance, or membership. When asked to describe the affective and

intellectual connection (“le rencontre du coeur et de la raison”) that tied him to Algeria,

Derrida responded that he remained Algerian at heart, and that political reason must

listen to the heart in order to be on the side of life, of justice, and of friendship.680

Echoing the “reaffirmation of life” with which he responded to Bourdieu’s passing,

                                                                                                               677 Ibid. 678 Ibid. 679 Ibid., 259.

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Derrida explained that he, Bourdieu, and the intellectuals of diverse nationalities who

shared and acted upon a sensitivity to the Algerian situation, did so because they felt

personally implicated by the Algerians’ plight:

The heart also says “we”: this living “we,” this “we” that declares itself

always for life and that takes up arms against threats of death, this is the we

who speaks, and rightly so, who prefers speech to the barbarism of

deadly weapons. It speaks, we speak where we must reflect, discuss,

negotiate with others, in a process that must last a long time; where we

must properly recognize, without physical violence, without

assassinations, without threats, without imprisonment and without

torture, the right to express disagreement or political criticism, in other

words, the right to civil peace and to the exercise of democracy.681

Although Derrida’s understanding of Algeria’s suffering was perhaps more lucid because

of this acute sensitivity, his affection for Algeria “aided him in understanding, by

analogies, displacements, and identifications,” the universal nature of the problems

Algeria faced.682 Thus, although Derrida’s sense of Algerian belonging motivated a

certain degree of partisanship, his philosophy speaks to a sense of cosmopolitan identity

and responsibility that was integral to the CISIA’s project.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           680 Derrida, correspondence with Metref. “[J]e reste un Algérien du cœur et la raison politique ne peut être du côté de la vie, de la justice et de l’amitié que si elle entend le cœur” (ibid.). 681 Derrida, correspondence with Metref. “Le cœur dit aussi « nous » : ce « nous » vivant, ce nous qui de déclare toujours pour la vie et s’insurge contre les menaces de mort, c’est le nous qui parle, justement, celui qui préfère la parole à la barbarie de l’arme meurtrière. Il parle, nous parlons là où il nous faudra bien réfléchir, discuter, négocier avec les autres, au cours d’un processus qui devra durer longtemps, là où il nous faudra bien reconnaître, sans violence physique, sans assassinat, sans menace, sans emprisonnement et sans torture, le droit à l’expression d’un désaccord ou d’une critique politique, c’est à dire à la paix civile et à l’exercice de la démocratie” (ibid.). 682 Derrida, correspondence with Metref. “Mais si je suis plus sensible, plus inquiet et par là-même, je l’espère et je m’y essaie, plus lucide du côté d’un pays que j’aime, cela même

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Conceived in light of these concerns, the CISIA’s work strives to establish

cosmopolitan allegiances through gestures of international solidarity among intellectuals.

This movement toward the re-orientation of identities and allegiances is symptomatic of

Derrida’s poststructuralist vision of the “new International,” a force that would “give

place to justice, to the messianic, and to the future without once again rooting new

identities in a fixed and deterministic regionality.”683 Within “the (unthinkable) concept

of the ‘new International,’” Leonard explains, there is “the possibility for affiliations and

associations that are not constrained by forms of national identification.”684 These de-

territorialized forms of identification are “triggered by the ‘international’ character of

communism,” but also represent a decisive shift, as they are formed “without

coordination, without party, without country, without national community...without co-

citizenship, without common belonging to a class.”685

For Derrida, therefore, the possibility for international justice required

“initiat[ing] new concepts of place and identity.”686 In Specters of Marx, Derrida “treats all

nationalisms—including resistant, counter-colonial, anti-globalization nationalisms—as

uniformly phobic inscriptions of frontiered belonging.” 687 Freeing intellectual

associations from their ties to “governments, institutions, and parties” thus constituted

an important step within the re-orientation of political allegiances, and toward a new

conception of internationalism. For Derrida, the vision of a “new International” implies

an “alternative form of association” that “does not, as it might appear, entail a rejection

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           m’aide à comprendre, par analogies, déplacements, identifications, les dimensions internationales dont nous parlions à l’instant” (ibid.). 683 Leonard, Nationality, 36. 684 Ibid. 685 Ibid. 686 Ibid.

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of national identifications, but instead ‘a link of affinity, suffering, and hope.’”688 The

force of the CISIA’s appeal, Derrida argued, derived from these affective bonds, which

he describes as “the anger, suffering, and shock—but also the resolution” of the Algerian

people.689 “Our Appel is made first and foremost in their name,” he argued, “and I even

think that rather than being addressed to them, it comes from them, it requires us, too,

to listen.”690

For both Derrida and Bourdieu, the CISIA’s work represented a shift toward just

such a “new Internationalism,” insofar as it aimed to “think beyond the nation-State,”

toward the future forms that national and international identities might take.691 For

Derrida, as Leonard explains, the ideals of “‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘hospitality,’” which

guided his actions throughout the CISIA’s campaign of civil resistance, “point to a future

that would allow national and international identity to take on new dimensions,” thus

“allow[ing] an alternative understanding of cultural belonging to emerge.” 692 By

demanding that France and other countries extend the right of political asylum to

Algerians seeking refuge, the CISIA participated in the cosmopolitan project of

“challenging existing institutions,” so as to work toward the possibility of “an other,

international justice.” 693 Derrida and Bourdieu’s shared cosmopolitan sensibility, as

partners and leaders of the CISIA, thus allowed the Committee to serve as a critical

nexus for the defense of an Algerian democracy to come.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           687 Ibid. 688 Ibid., 47; see also Derrida, Specters of Marx, 90. 689 Derrida, “Parti pris pour l’Algérie,” 241. "La colère, la souffrance, la commotion mais aussi la résolution de ces Algériens et de ces Algériennes, nous en avons mille signes.” 690 Ibid. "Notre Appel se fait d'abord en leur nom, et je crois qu'avant même de leur être adressé, il vient d'eux, il vient d'elles, qu'il nous fait aussi entendre" (ibid.). 691 Leonard, Nationality, 49. 692 Ibid., 45.

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           693 Ibid., 49.

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Ont appelé à soutenir les intellectuels algériens694

ADONIS (Poète, Paris), Ch. R. AGERON (Historie, Paris), H. ALLEG (Ecrivain, Paris), M. AOUNIT (MRAP, Paris), A. AZRIE (Compositeur, Paris), E. BADINTER (Philosophe, Paris), T. BEKRI (Poète, Paris), D. BENSAID (Professeur, Paris), M. BERRADA (Ecrivain, Rabat), Dr. R. BERTHELIER (Migration-Santé, Paris), M. BLOCH (London School of Economics, Londres), P. BOURDIEU (Collège de France, Paris), J. DERRIDA (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris), J. FAVRET-SAADA (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris), D. FAWZI (Historienne, Paris), L. GARDEL (Ecrivain, Paris), C. GEERTZ (Anthropologue, Princeton), E. GELLNER (Anthropologue, Cambridge), S. FASQUELLE (Présidente du Pen Club de France), J. GOYTISOLO (Ecrivain, Madrid), J. HABERMAS (Philosophe, Francfort), F. HALIDAY (London School of Economics, Londres), L. HELLER (Poéticienne, Cologne), D. JAMET (Président de la Bibliothèque de France, Paris), J. LECA (Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Paris), E. MANET (Réalisateur, Bruxelles), Pr. MINKOVSKI (Médecin, Paris), A. MIQUEL (Collège de France, Paris), A. RACHID (Universitaire, Le Caire), A. RAYMOND (Historien, Aix-en-Provence), REY-GOLDZIGUER (Historienne, Riems), M. RODINSON (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris), J.-CL. SALOMON (Cancérologue, CNRS, Paris), C. SCHORSKE (Historien, Princeton), E. SANBAR (Etudes Palestiniennes, Paris), A. SERFATY (Ingénieur, Paris), M. SID-AHMED (Publiciste, Le Caire), L. SOLIMANE (Journaliste, Paris), L. VALENSI (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris). Sont déjà membres du CISIA : P. BOURDIEU, A. SERFATY, M. HARBI J. Ph. AOUDIA, R. BABADJI, E. BALIBAR, P. BOTTE, N. BOUMAZA, K. BROWN, N. CHAPERON, M. CHEMILLIER-GENDREAU, A. CHERKI, F. COLONNA, S. CORDELIER, F. COUSIN, H. CUENAT, Z. DAOUD, Ch. DAURE-SERFATY, R. DAVEZIES, V. DELEMOS, J.P. DIGARD, A. DJEGHLOUL, Dj. FARES, N. FARES, F. GEZE, F. GRASSER, B. GUILHERY, M. GUILLON, J.R. HENRY, J.L. HURST, A. LAABI, J. LAABI, C. LACOSTE-DUJARDIN, C. LEFEBRE, J. LENTIN, C. LEVY, A. MAHIOU, K. MECHTA, A. MEDDEB, M.Cl. MENDES-FRANCE, M. et Mme. MERROUCHE, F. METRAL, M. MUNK, A. PRENANT, R. RAISSI, D. RIVET, E. ROBLES, A. ROTH, E. ROUDINESCO, A. SAYAD, A. SENIUK, D. SIGAUT, R. VARTEL, L. VERLET, M. VIROLLE, M. ZEMMOURI, J. ZIEGLER, etc.

                                                                                                               694 CISIA, “Charte du CISIA.”

  167

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