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Book R eviews its production of further exchange value, through, that is, its inexhaustible capacity for reproduction and recirculation. One might wish then to be a little more suspicious of the ideological grounds for finding an intrinsic value in the difficult text inasmuch as it derives from a capacity for recircula­ tion, and a little less embarrassed about explication, if one seeks to make that conjunction between “theory” and “practice” which Marxism necessarily enjoins. Surely, though from a bourgeois perspective this may still seem paradoxical, it is in use that Jameson’s texts, dif­ ficult or not, will realize their value, rather than in their perpetual recirculation through the crypts of criticism. D a v id L lo y d University of California, Berkeley Abdelkebir Khatibi. M a g h r e b P l u r i e l . Paris: Denoël, 1983. Pp. 225. The critical writings of Abdelkebir Khatibi of Morocco provide some of the most articu­ late and penetrating commentary available on the francophone writer of the Maghreb, caught between Islamic reformism and traditional Islamic theology, on the one hand, and, on the other, the Western will to power infusing the language he has chosen to use. To effect an issue from the double ideology that stifles the Maghrebian writer, Khatibi seeks to develop a new discourse of alterity. By its very marginality, by virtue of its minority position and its domination by the West, the Third World holds the potential of elaborating “une pensée plurielle qui ne réduise pas les autres (sociétés et individus) à la sphère de son autosuffisance” (p. 18). This pensée autre and plurielle that he proposes, drawing force from its very marginality, would constitute the basis for the creation of a new dialogue based on difference. It would operate to deconstruct the constraints and overcome the inertia inflicted on the Maghrebian francophone speaker by both Western ideology and his Islamic heritage and free his discourse from obsession with origin and identity. The third way open to the silent society of the Third World, unheard by the West, would valorize “ni la raison ni la déraison telles que les a pensées l’Occident dans son tout, mais une subversion en quelque sorte double, qui, se donnant le pouvoir de parole et d’action, set met en oeuvre dans une différence intraitable. Se décoloniser serait l’autre nom de cette pensée-autre, et la décolonisation l’achèvement silencieux de la métaphysique occidentale. Là commence cette parole tierce, cette dé-liaison de la raison occidentale, dans ses sciences et ses techniques” (p. 51). This discourse of the silent, which rejects the discourse of power under the sway of Western logocentric thought, engages in what Khatibi calls a “double critique.” It takes its point of departure from Derrida who suggests a way to counter the contamination of dis­ course by ethnocentrism: “Il s’agit de poser expressément et systématiquement le problème du statut d’un discours empruntant à un héritage les ressources nécessaires à la déconstruc­ tion de cet héritage lui-même. Problème d’économie et de stratégie” (cited pp. 56-7, from L ’Ecriture et la différence, p. 414). For Khatibi, the double critique will play just such a role, with the difference that “le lieu de notre parole et de notre discours est un lieu duel par notre situation bilingue” (p. 57). The Maghrebian writer of French radically inscribes himself in the “interval” between identity and difference. “Cet intervale est la scène du texte, son enjeu. Dans la littérature maghrébine, un tel intervalle—quand il devient texte et poème—s’impose par son étrangeté radicale, c’est-à-dire une écriture qui cherche ses racines dans une autre langue, dans un dehors absolu” (p. 141). The Maghrebian writer has chosen that “étrangeté radicale” which is bilingualism. In the most engaging essay of the collection, “Bilingualisme et Vo l. XXVI, No. 1 101 littérature,” Khatibi sets forth the premise that certain Maghrebian texts written in French resist a formal and functional interpretive approach, for the maternal tongue of...

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