fruitfulness and dynamism of these intermediary spaces. Once again, fictional treatments of contemporary issues have paved the way for scientific analyses to be carried out in various disciplines. Novels, art, and films anticipate the cultural and theoretical work to come.
In a rather dark landscape, those leading the struggle carve out an admittedly narrow but nonetheless real path. Many stories get written between heaven and earth. In Algerian literature, writing becomes a vehicle for censored languages and confiscated dreams. It is thus a manner of giving life to an alterity that is suppressed in the political sphere. To accomplish this, Algerian writers deftly deploy the art of détournement.8 In their hands, language becomes a ruse they can manipulate for their own purposes. The literary text repeatedly calls attention to the official (political) narrative in an effort to divert the censors while making their erasures visible. Writing is an antidote to political coercion. Nabile Farès (1940–2016) had noted this problem as early as 1976: “We are besieged and erased by those in power like dirty words written in sand.”9
Contemporary Algerian literature is a deliberate refusal of the many forms of deceit first practiced by the colonial power and then by the Algerian state. In 2016, the young writer Samir Toumi illustrated in his novel L’Effacement the alarm of an Algerian subject who is suffering from a terrible condition: the disappearance of his reflection and the erasure of his memory. Erased and absorbed into a “triumphant” nation, this character is a metaphor for the political treatment of memory in Algeria. The suffering subject feels that “everything is being erased, inexorably, … I’ve been set adrift in a hazy space where everything is blurred and blanked out.”10 Struggling with the disappearance of his reflection, the son calls on his father for help, but his father urges him to embrace being swept into a heroic “national” narrative:
He told me it wasn’t worth it, because I had him. He was the reflection of both my body and soul. Besides, it had always been this way. When I told him about my vanishing and the disappearance of all my memories, he shrugged his shoulders. You have mine, he responded, they are more interesting and much richer. I have a war to give you, a magnificent victory and the building of an immense nation, what more could you want? I’m giving them to you, my memories are yours. I thanked papa as he stroked my head.11
The literary text and the invisible staging of power
The inaugural political gesture of the first Francophone Algerian writers of the colonial era came from their détournement of one language (French) for the benefit of another (their mother tongue). This also gave them an original literary style, one distinguished by an invisible plurality of linguistic and textual spaces, both sanctioned and unsanctioned by the colonial order. Many languages and modes of thought were “smuggled” into these literary texts, constituting in this way their own underground space.12 This is how détournement disrupts the channels between private and public censorship. This practice also exposes the staging of power. It does this by making invisible political spaces visible, thereby stripping censorship of its power by allowing it to be heard in the text. Writing gives (textual) form to what is erased or prohibited from the subject’s thinking. What is silenced in an individual’s speech finds expression in the literary text.
On the one hand, the novel designates the unnameable and shines light on what is held in the dark by the political order. On the other hand, on a daily basis, subjects continue to submit to the law of silence and repression, making speech the site par excellence of allusion and enigma, as observed in my clinical practice in Algiers. This fine-tuned operation serves many paradoxical purposes: it both helps and hurts the subject in its life decisions and thought processes. It works by construing speech, thought, and actions as a single totality. This stands in contrast to the traditional form of totalitarianism, where what is and isn’t allowed is dictated by the political order and never mistaken by the subject. In this case, a totalizing force is internalized with no visible and identifiable dictator. This is why I prefer to call it totalizing rather than totalitarian.
In this context, the subject depends on artful schemes. At first, it believes itself smarter than the censors: it submits to them superficially while hoping to carve out an invisible path (“unseen, unharmed”) for its dreams and desires. Submitting to the censors’ laws becomes therefore a means of transgressing them. This is tantamount to saying: “Since nothing is allowed in clear daylight, then everything becomes possible for me in the dark.” Except that the practice of détournement – which takes pleasure in disruption – proves to be short-lived and can easily turn into its opposite. Indeed, little by little, the subject begins to forget the subversive aim of its ruse. It ends up agreeing to the terms of its own imprisonment and abandons along the way its initial goal, which was to elude the censors. Brought under the totalizing force of the exterior censors it sought to subvert [détourner], it unwittingly helps design the system it was fighting against.
As a result, censorship becomes so ingrained that it feels like law. Censorship on the individual and collective scale works in lockstep to preserve the possibility of pleasure [jouissance] – understood here as a form of destruction, inertia, collapse of the inside, and absence of internal limits. The subject learns to its own detriment to make use of what besieges it. Although overwhelming for subjectivities, censorship also offers tremendous advantages, since many of the barriers it imposes are perceived as fictive. While yielding to these barriers, the subject also spends a great deal of time devising schemes to bypass them unseen. Except that, on the visible stage, it must convey perfect obedience so that its internal détournements are not unmasked. Once beyond the barriers, the subject arrives at a site within its subjectivity where vastness and chaos, light and shadow, desires and taboos become indistinguishable. In this tragicomic drama, the subject strengthens to its detriment public censorship by becoming in the eyes of others a loyal defender of the established order. In this way, specific modalities of political power are embedded in each individual. As Mohammed Dib writes: “But you have been left with total freedom! Only the freedom of others is at stake.”13 Détournement thus disarms the subject’s insurrection against censorship, as it moves from making compromises with censorship to becoming almost permanently compromised by it. The totalizing force is thus able to break the subject’s necessary radicalism by guiding its existence.
In this dynamic, oppressive game between different forms of censorship, permission and prohibition, the real responsibilities of the subject (and of the political order) are clouded over as it struggles to orient its existence. Paradoxically, the process of internal emancipation doesn’t lead to any sort of liberation. Instead, it breeds the feeling of fear, both of one’s self and of the Other. The transgressions carried out in the private sphere bring some immediate satisfaction, but the brief trip taken ultimately leads back to where it all started. Liberation turns out to be a mere dream, one that is poorly understood by the political power and, worse still, by the subject itself. The subject is forever performing a balancing act between emancipation and imprisonment. Its performance is both discreet and innovative as it seeks another exit while still respecting the general choreography. But its innovations then become part of the main act, and the subject gets lost in its own duplicity.
Since the end of the 2000s, censorship in Algeria has grown more complex and subtle. Algerian literature today, for its part, has grown richer and more impactful thanks to the art of détournement. Censorship strives to create a unified public by homogenizing subjectivities. This isn’t unique to Algeria. It takes place in other forms all over the world. A purely cultural view of Algerian society fails to note the role politics plays in this and the paradoxical workings of a stratified censorship, which has become almost a sensory experience in and of itself. The subject both fights and gives in to its antagonists (internal and external).
An exacerbated religious morality seems to be the vehicle of communication for these censors. It has invaded the various spheres of private and public life to such an extent that morality, religion, and culture appear to have merged. This invasion has affected the very means of co-existence as well
