Al-Shidyaq’s Decadent Carnival

This chapter shows how al-Shidyaq’s novel, Al-Saq ‘ala al-Saq (Leg Over Leg), produces a radical critique of the supposed philological decadence of the Arabic language. The text does this through a carnivalization of Arabic, where the author generates the kind of ambivalence that is constitutive of the category of grotesque realism in Bakhtin’s account of the carnivalesque. By articulating the subaltern status of Arabs under Ottoman rule in a language marked by dynamism, excess, and proliferation, al-Shidyaq is able to make powerlessness and disease signify awakening and renaissance. The novel challenges the Eurocentric origins of the novelistic form while simultaneously disproving, in raucous fashion, both the Orientalist thesis of the decadence of Semitic languages and cultures and the self-diagnosis of the Arab nahda that sought to cleanse Arabic of tradition to modernize it.

French Decadence, Arab Awakenings

Chapter 1 does a comparative reading of French theories of philological decadence and Arabic and Islamic accounts of reformism and modernization in the second half of the nineteenth century. It begins with an examination of the secular philosophy of history of French Orientalist Ernest Renan, which both denies the very existence of decadence as a useful category of analysis and simultaneously constructs the Semite as inherently decadent. Renan’s 1883 debate with Persian reformist intellectual Jamal al-din al-Afghani demonstrates how European Orientalism set the terms for discussions of modernity but also how al-Afghani’s response partially defamiliarizes the categories of thought that frame the debate itself. The chapter ends with an exploration of two Arabic analyses of Arab decadence by Farah Antun and Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, who, along with al-Afghani, constitute a mode of “nomad thought” that contrasts markedly with Renan’s self-satisfied and self-centering diagnosis of Oriental decadence.

Toward a Contrapuntal Double Critique of Colonial Modernity

While some postcolonial critics have championed Abdelkebir Khatibi’s notion of “double critique” over Edward Said’s method of “contrapuntal reading” (Lionnet), this conclusion argues for a novel way of combining these two approaches. Khatibi’s elaboration of the intersign and his deployment of the intersemiotic in his work illustrate a way of reading both the positive and negative signs of the decay of colonial modernity, while also gauging the spaces and intervals between them. Saidian contrapuntal reading allows critics to account for the historical sedimentation of knowledge and how it is built up in specific languages but not in others. Contrapuntal double critique, then, can deconstruct the oppositions constitutive of the field of imperialist discourse without disabling oppositional, anti-imperialist critique. The conclusion outlines Khatibi’s transcolonial Maghrebi traveling theory, which is explored in his writing on Jean Genet and in the explication of his own novel Un Été à Stockholm. It ends by questioning the category of “francophone literature” as a monolingual, self-contained version of comparative literature.

Algerian Women and the Invention of Literary Mourning

This chapter revisits the gendering of loss in discourses of decadence through an exploration of four texts by Algerian authors. Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Dhakirat al-Jasad (Memory of the Body), Yamina Méchakra’s La Grotte éclatée (The Blasted Cave), Assia Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algérie (Algerian White), and Hélène Cixous’s Si près (So Close) each produce spontaneous, singular forms of female solidarity in the face of institutional expectations relating to language, religion, and the state that overdetermine the value of women’s social work of remembering and forgetting. The chapter explores these four texts in light of psychoanalytic theories of mourning and melancholia and also a certain injunction of postcolonial theory that would impose permanent melancholia on postcolonial writing and thought. These texts experiment with inventive modes of literary mourning, from the “female grotesque” (Mary Russo) to a range of syntactic elaborations, which propose a different cure for postcolonial melancholia and open the possibility of a “melancholia of the public sphere” (Judith Butler).

From Dreyfus in the Colony to Céline’s Anti-Semitic Style

Orientalist philology brought people deemed Semitic together under the rubric of Semitism, and it subsequently broke up this forced grouping into the distinct categories of Jew, Arab, and Muslim. Chapter 3 demonstrates how the Dreyfus Affair exacerbated tensions between Jews, Muslims, and European residents of French colonial Algeria at the end of the nineteenth century. It explores the history of philological Semitism, discusses the legal status of Jews and Muslims in Algeria, and summarizes how the Dreyfus Affair affected Algerian politics and business. In order to think through the stylistics of French colonial anti-Semitism, the chapter examines pro-Jewish and anti-Jewish texts from the Algerian press of the 1890s. It ends with a close reading of Céline’s Bagatelles pour un massacre, demonstrating the way that popular literary philology reveals a lasting fracture between Jews, Arabs, and Muslims, while also exposing a process of psychological minoritization of the French majority population.

Orientalist Decadence

The introduction presents an overview of the ways that theories and representations of decadence and decay have functioned in the relationship between France and the Arab world since the nineteenth century. Bringing the ideas of Walter Benjamin to bear on the Arab nahda, Islamic reformism, and Orientalist philology, it elaborates a theory of historical awakening as mutual defamiliarization. The introduction concludes by demonstrating how the anti-Semitic Orientalism of Ernest Renan fabricated the “Orient” as an object of knowledge that carried within it the mechanisms of its own undoing.

Virtual Secularization

This chapter examines the knot of meanings that have been attributed to the mobile Arab body and Arabic script in post-9/11 Orientalist Islamophobic fantasy. A reading of Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Talismano and Phantasia demonstrates how the body of the Arab immigrant or traveler becomes the field of battle upon which the ideological conflicts of Orientalism’s decaying discourses are played out. Meddeb’s work is analyzed in relation to Nietzsche’s revisions of the concept of decadence and the body, as well as critical frames from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Pierre Klossowski, Dina al-Kassim, Michel de Certeau, and Réda Bensmaïa. Meddeb injects Arabic and Islamic techniques of circulation into networks of power inherent within the postcolonial nation-state to enact a kind of virtual secularization, meaning a translation of Islamic cultural practices from Arabic into French. His work produces a postcolonial urbanism that conveys the overlapping chronotopes of the flâneur and the médinant (an idler in the Arab médina), leaving only the trace of an itinerary

Resurrecting Colonial Decadence in Independent Algeria

Chapter 4 proposes re-reading the language politics of the Algerian Civil War through the lens of Orientalist modes of evaluating language. It offers a summary of the conditions prevailing during the period of Arabization and its relation to Algerian society and the Algerian economy. This is followed by a comparative reading of Tahir Wattar’s Arabic novel, Al-Zilzal (The Earthquake) (1974), and Tahar Djout’s French novel, L’Invention du désert (The Invention of the Desert) (1987), which both develop a postcolonial critique of the concept of decadence. By narrating the Algerian present through the degenerating consciousness of two figures embodying a highly paternalistic understanding of Islamic tradition, these novels trace the limits of the role of French and Arabic in both Algerian national culture and transnational space. A critique of postcolonial decadence emerges that challenges the very idea of the nation in configurations of the loss inscribed within the discourse of decadence.