Rethinking the Radical West: Khatibi and Deconstruction

Rethinking the Radical West: Khatibi and Deconstruction Mary Ellen Wolf La différence n’est pas accordée au premier révolté —Abdelkebir Khatibi O N THE FIRST PAGE of Abdelkebir Khatibi’s Maghreb pluriel we encounter a quotation from the concluding chapter of The Wretched o f the Earth, a quotation in which Frantz Fanon urges his comrades to leave Europe behind, to reject its legacies, and to find “ something different.” While admitting the urgent necessity of finding “ something different,” Khatibi immediately poses the problematic. Which Europe, or rather which “ European game” are we to leave behind, he wonders, and how can we disentangle ourselves from the Europe which has rearranged the most intimate recesses of our “being” ? 1 In taking up Fanon’s call for decolonization, Khatibi has no choice but to insist on its reformulation. Decolonizing strategies have, up to this point, proven ineffective, missed their mark—for imperialism and ethnocentrism are forces which continue to operate in more or less covert ways. The contestatory voices of Maghrebian Independence, while obliquely present, have become by the late seventies barely audible and virtually powerless. It is in the interest of empowering a different voice—collective, eth­ nic, decentered, multi-lingual—that Khatibi redefines decolonization as a deconstructive praxis of difference. If divested of the “ resentment” which colors it, and the “ simplistic Hegelianism” which ultimately neutralizes it, decolonization can be reframed and made to work in the space of an “ uncompromising” difference—“une différence intraitable” (MP 50). Rather than reclaiming the “right to difference,” which is already an inalienable one, Khatibi proposes to exploit difference as a textual strategy, one which attacks those forms of knowledge, Western or not, which preserve and serve existing power relations. Thus begins the dialogue with the Radical West—most notably, with Derrida’s decon­ struction and Foucault’s discourse analysis. Khatibi’s tactical alliance is intended not only to initiate dialogue but to wage war on alternate grounds. It is a radical offensive which simultaneously engages the dis­ 58 Su m m e r 1994 W o lf cursive processes of imperial thought (“ son pouvoir de parole,” MP 48) and the totalizing metaphysical constructs of Arab theocracy. While the boldness of this critical gesture is evident, its oppositional potential can only be determined through close textual readings. My aim is to analyze Khatibi’s “ double critique” as a particular brand of deconstruction, a practice which is not merely borrowed but transformed by another context. To be appropriated and developed is a critical awareness of the links between philosophy, ideology and science. Or, as Khatibi puts it, the “ ideological adaptations of metaphysical concepts” (DC 14). In the third essay of Maghreb pluriel, a piece on Jacques Berque, an eminent sociologist and Arabic specialist at the Collège de France, Khatibi exhibits this awareness by performing a deconstructive reading. The dis­ course targeted is Orientalism and its practitioner Berque is a proclaimed believer in decolonization and the worldwide preservation of cultural pluralism. By exposing the Eurocentric underpinnings of Berque’s text, Khatibi’s intention is twofold: first, to disorient the Orientalist project— hence the article’s title “ L’Orientalisme désorienté” ; second, and per­ haps more important, to project a radical orientalism rooted in a textuality which opens up and unravels the imperialist matrix. It is surely both intentions which motivate the uncanny, shifting design of Khatibi’s critique. Presented as an exercise in philosophical reasoning, the middle section or “ argument” is flanked by two exergues respectively numbered I and II. Upon closer examination, we note that the phrase which ends the first exergue also begins or remarks the second exergue or postface. Significantly, this phrase asserts the superior posi­ tion of the Orientalist scholar who ideally straddles two cultures: “ En un sens noble, l’orientaliste est celui qui veille sur l’aube de la pensée” (OD 177). The watching over or witnessing of the dawning of thought, an obvious reference to the Enlightenment, creates a privileged relation to a primordial, transparent origin. Yet this relation is coterminous with the desire for nobility and elevated perspective: “ il faudrait accorder à l’orientalisme tout son désir de noblesse, de son élévation de vue...