of thirdness that justice creates in the ordering of social bonds. As is well known, in Argentina, the Trial of the Juntas (Juicio a las Juntas Militares) began in 1985, under the new democracy formed after the end of the dictatorship – which lasted from 1976 to 1983, used torture as a systematic method for social control, and disappeared 30,000 people. The trial led to the sentencing of commanding officers. The trials of hundreds of others responsible for state terrorism during the dictatorship continue even today (marked by interruptions and political vicissitudes that are too numerous to discuss in detail in this context), in cases of crimes against humanity that are still pending or that have already concluded in cities throughout the country. This process prompted me to write the following about the statements made during these trials:
“And one day they didn’t come back,” some witnesses say, family members of the disappeared. … But when, on what day, did they not come back? How can we indicate that day, if all days until today are in fact that day? How can we define the absence of absence? Can we understand that those responsible are being tried for “disappearances” and not for “deaths”? What do we need in order to name the unnameable, identify the unidentifiable, specify the unspecifiable, locate the unlocatable? How can we date and provide coordinates for what never took place? How could the witness acknowledge the existence of a crime that was never definitively committed, because it keeps being committed? (Wikinski, 2016, p. 88)
In Algeria, as Lazali explains, the fate of the bodies that were torn apart or disappeared has never been investigated. Nor have there been investigations to determine who was responsible during each of the phases in which these crimes took place.
Lazali lucidly describes terror as a psychic state that, unlike trauma, does not allow for forgetting or repression, that does not lead to the emergence of a new subjective position, but instead blurs the boundaries between the psychic apparatus and the biological body, between the singular and the collective, between the inside and the outside. Terror remains untethered; it cannot be circumscribed. It is perhaps a matter of an encrustation without a subject, of a devastation that can even prevent the recognition of the state of terror by the subject who is undergoing and suffering from it.
The author can distinguish between trauma and terror in this way and can demonstrate that the notion of trauma is insufficient for explaining the effects of colonial violence because she fluently traverses the fields of subjective singularity, collective phenomena, the clinic, literature, and politics, and because she clearly identifies present, historical, and trans-subjective phenomena. In this way, she reveals the traces of colonialism on both the social and subjective levels, considering an event that was by all accounts unlimited in its effects, one that resounds deafeningly in the subjective journeys of many generations throughout Algerian history. We do not find in Lazali’s work any fictitious distinction between the individual and the collective; nor do we find a failure to distinguish between these realms. Instead, we confront a profoundly Freudian way of thinking in which an articulation between these spaces is constantly produced, in a fabric of numerous determinations that are always interwoven with one another.
In this sense, Lazali can be seen to be indebted to the work of Frantz Fanon, who, writing while events were still unfolding, was able to address the implantation of alienation in the psyches of the colonized as well as the improbable work of subjective decolonization that it entailed.
There will always be an expropriation of the self when colonization is imposed. What cannot be spoken of in the space of psychoanalysis, the subjective dimension in history, the unthought that finds expression in literature: it is in these recesses, Lazali tells us, that we can perhaps find the keys for understanding the subjective effects of a history of devastation whose beginning will soon mark its two-hundredth anniversary.
Many figures of the negative – negation, denegation, foreclosure, the “hole,” disavowal, repudiation – can be adduced to give an account of this blank, or what is at times, according to Lazali, a “black silence” that marks what “it is impossible to forget.”
The author refers to Francophone Algerian literature – a corpus that includes several clearly autobiographical works – to glean what cannot be said from the critical deviations (détournements) of this literature’s language and from its use of transliteration. Deviation for its own sake becomes a value, a process that makes “the untranslatable” into an object to be transmitted. Lazali also finds resources in these novels that can be used to oppose the censorship of thought and language that has marked colonial and postcolonial history. “How could psychoanalysts work without having read them?” Lazali might thus wonder, paraphrasing Benjamin Stora.
Lazali reads the works of Kateb Yacine, Nabile Farès, Jean El Mouhoub Amrouche, Malek Haddad, Yamina Mechakra, Chawki Amari, Rachid Mimouni, Mansour Kedidir, Mohammed Dib, Samir Toumi, Amin Zaoui, Kamel Daoud, Mouloud Feraoun, and Albert Camus in order to shed light on the zones rendered invisible by colonialism and by the leveling “mise sous totalité” of postcoloniality.
If, having read this extraordinary book, we had to choose one word with which to express compellingly the effects of colonialism on both sides of the Mediterranean, we would surely choose the French word effacement, meaning erasure. This is an erasure that is political in its origins, of course, begun by French colonialism, with its need to deny the fact that it deposited this abject remainder of the monarchy, which was “exported” to the colony. Identity, language, tradition, genealogy, patronyms: all were demolished as if Algeria had no history. But Lazali suggests that the erasure also includes internal and fratricidal confrontations and postcolonial state terror. This was an erasure or non-inscription, then, of all genealogy, alterity, and difference, for, Lazali suggests, such heterogeneity threatens the work of constructing a “we,” the coerced effort to create a uniform national essence or way of being that begins with the Algerian War of Liberation.
The celebration of the figure of the hero or martyr in the War of Liberation offers nothing more than an alibi, a distraction from the intensification of this erasure. This was a matter of refounding Algeria, erasing the colonial past, not “deconstructing” but rather “reconstructing,” Lazali indicates. This reconstruction presupposes the creation of a heroic gesture of liberation, and it presumes that deaths caused by internal wars should not be surveyed. The postcolonial imposition of one language, Arabic, and of one religion, Islam, in Algeria led to the production of a myth: the myth of the birth of a nation that, again, arbitrary and denialist, erases the past and seeks to establish a point of origin or degree zero for history.
Perhaps this blank in the history of a colonizing (republican?) France, which denies the shameful, monarchic remainder that determined its strategy for occupation, corresponds to a historical blank in Algeria, a denial of the shameful history of responsibility for internal wars. This leads to a paradoxical effect on the way to liberation: the historiography of Algeria at first refers almost exclusively back to colonization, and a pure, urgent, extreme, and totalizing nationalism emerges to heal the damage done. As Lazali explains, an excess of memory also emerges in relation to colonialism, an excess that is in the service of erasure, that safeguards the blank in memory itself, like a spotlight that sheds too much light and so dazzles us. Thus a gradual transformation takes place: colonial trauma becomes social trauma.
Lazali writes:
With a political agenda predicated on eradicating all forms of alterity, coloniality has inflamed hatred by seeking to preserve the One by killing the Other. To what extent does the rise of “nationalism” in Algeria coincide with the barring of alterity? And what impact has colonialism’s negation of the paternal function had on contemporary politics? (p. 101)
These turn out to be central questions for the development of her argument. The advent of colonialism destroyed the paternal function, defined as a symbolic function and a function of thirdness that organizes the social bond, genealogy, the delineation of communities of belonging, and the constitution of identity
