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It is difficult to distinguish clearly between what is affected and what is neglected by colonial history. One paradoxical result is that in their respective situations, each of the two opposing groups may refuse to admit the other’s place in history. By his actions as well as through his knowledge, the European disputes the native’s share in the evolution which is now taking place under his eyes and which he has to a large extent provoked. He reacts with authoritarian conservatism to archaic, traditionalist Muslim attitudes; he explains them by an ethnology that is obsessed with the primitive, or by a pluralistic psychology. On the other hand, the European often appears to the native merely as a deus ex machina, a god or rather a devil brought forth by the machine, a tempter and a destroyer, incapable of human adaptability. Utilitarian requirements on the one side, metaphysical prescriptions on the other thus prevented the two opponents from understanding the history confronting them. It is true bythen the depth of men’s feelings, the violence of their acts was to confer on history an anthropological dimension. When that time came, generosity and cruelty, sexual ardor and revolutionary faith, critical awareness and tumultuous passion would be fused in the same violence.
JACQUES BERQUE, 1962
With a few notable exceptions, the French were never fully Algerianized by their involvement with Algerian revolutionaries. In fact the reverse could be said to be true. Algerian were in many ways profoundly influenced—despite repeated warnings by many intellectuals—by the theories of non-Algerian writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon, who focused on negative dialectics, violence, and radical Otherness as a means of reconstituting Algerian postcolonial identity. Ultimately, and without being reductionist, this proved disastrous for the emerging Algerian nation after independence, especially as Algerian leaders such as Houari Boumediene (who spent most of the war with the FLN in Tunis) eagerly grafted Sartrian and Fanonian theories of identity and belief in the revolutionary potential of the Algerian peasantry onto Algeria’s political programs.
This is not to imply, of course, that there were not other factors (such as the economy, industrialization, agricultural problems, the opec oil crisis, failure to allow for a multiparty political system, and demographic changes) that led Algeria into its present postcolonial condition. But we cannot neglect the effect of theories of identity formulated during the war on Algeria following decolonization. The single most important theoretical concern of decolonization, alterity or the issue of Otherness, has also continued to resonate clearly in nearly all Algerian debates since independence in July 1962. For this reason, I believe it is instructive here to underscore how the political, cultural, and intellectual uses of the concept of the Other and the notion of Otherness fit into the history of the French-Algerian War.
In many cases political Othering rose from the ashes of the idea of Franco-Algerian reconciliation.1 Said differently, the use of Otherness by intellectuals generally came to the fore after reconciliation efforts had been sufficiently exhausted. Nevertheless, there were also intellectuals (both Algerian and French) who used the concept of the Other and the notion of Otherness (alterity) without implying that tolerance was a thing of the past and, in fact, argued that the proper understanding of Other or Otherness could keep nonviolent reconciliation alive even after independence. And although the concept certainly antedates the French-Algerian War (some of the intellectuals discussed had already used it in formal, phenomeno-logical discussions of identity), Othering takes on specific meanings in the identity politics that emerged during the decolonization of Algeria.2 In fact, there were generally two camps of Otherers—those who used the concept to foster tolerance and those who used the concept to destroy tolerance. There were also those who used “Other” in specific, or Otherness in general, to highlight the relationship of decolonization to identity during the war.
To facilitate this discussion, this chapter is divided loosely into two sections. The first treats the use of Other as a formal concept in philosophy and the social sciences. The second focuses on popularized discussions of Otherness, which relates most directly to the issue of anticolonial violence. The two uses were of course connected. However, the rise in popularity of discussions of Otherness during the French-Algerian War—especially when the Other was used as both an analytical tool and a political ploy— related directly to political events in Algeria and to ideological issues that intellectuals confronted in metropolitan France and elsewhere.
Representations of the Other’s identity in most cases went in tandem with representations and the projection of the Self. In fact, as will become clear, when intellectuals began to Other Algerians (or vice versa), both conceptually and politically, disagreement among intellectuals over questions of intellectual legitimacy reemerged and were entangled in endeavors to represent French and Algerian identity. There is in this sense something postmodern in these debates, and, without question, the emergence of postmodern theories relates to the questions raised below.3 In other words, an explicit relationship existed between Otherness and the problem of intellectual legitimacy or power, and this relationship polarized the debates in extreme ways. Moreover, because debates relating to use of Other, identity, and violence antedate today’s discussions of Orientalism and Otherness, they should alert readers to issues implicit in present-day identity politics. This chapter is therefore intended to encourage today’s researchers to pause before using the concept “Other” and think through its political, social, and epistemological repercussions.
Using the “Other” Word
Just after the Mélouza massacre in May 1957, Maurice Maschino—an early draft resister living in exile in Tunisia—used the concept “Other” to locate nationalist violence within the dehumanizing problem of colonization.4 According to him, violence had to be explained through a phenomenological analysis of the worldview of Algerian identity. This required a detailed explanation of the significance of the lived experience of the Algerian nationalists, which in turn had to be understood by the French as an ontological problem.
Ontology, or the problem of Being, Maschino argued, was especially important for Algerians. He explained that violence was an artifact of this problem because it was merely an expression of the Algerians’ effort to “recuperate their lost being.”5 French colonialism was to blame for the violence because Algeria’s French had enjoyed extraordinary privileges challenging the core of Algerians’ sense of being. “What are the Algerians revolting against?” he asked. “Against being treated by the Europeans as second-rate beings [d’être-au-rabais], which has been an important factor correlatively and until now in ensuring [the Europeans’] an excessive and hypertrophic form of being. For the Algerian, it [the revolt] is a matter of being; for the European, it is a matter of being superior.” In short, the revolt was an attempt to equalize difference between the hypertrophy of the colonial European’s ontological Self and the atrophy of the Algerian’s ontological Otherness.
Colonization, according to Maschino, had robbed Algerians of their most basic material properties. Colonialism, by this definition, was “the pure instrumentalization of men and the physical riches of Algeria; the Algerians had become just another material source to be exploited along with the minerals and the cows.” But colonization had done much more than that; it had also robbed them of their souls, their Being. Hence the fight against the colonial system was really a struggle to regain true selfhood:
The being that they [the Algerians] are reconquering with weapons is not mythical; it is not a philosophical abstraction; it is the era of man, his humanity, the sense of his existence and his substance. The acquisition of rights is secondary, the fundamental [right] is not the right to live, but the right to be a man. To treat a man as a man, to take charge of his own human existence, is to cease to be an instrument of the Other. The Algerian Revolution is first a demand for humanity.
In Maschino’s analysis, the Other was the Frenchman, the outsider, the pernicious colonialist, and the thief of Algerian Being. The Algerians’ struggle had become an ontological problem because denying Algerian nationalism meant rejecting the Algerians’ Being or identity. For this reason, the French-Algerian War was not merely a question of rights in the French republican sense; rather, revolution represented first and foremost an effort to reclaim “humanity” (read Being) for Algerians.
Within this logic, independence, not reconciliation, was the first step toward Algerian selfhood. And if any people should be familiar with this ontological mandate, Maschino insisted, it would be the French. In fact, Maschino took French rights-of-man theorists at their word and suggested that the freedom found during the French Revolution had produced the modern French soul. Since revolutionary freedom was part of the French national psyche, the French could not legitimately continue to deny independence to Algerians without doing tragic damage to the so-called universalism of the French soul. In short, Maschino brilliantly used the specific claims of French universalism both to subvert the age-old mission civilisatrice ideology and to protect the universalistic message of freedom found within the French Enlightenment.
It is fair to say that efforts to understand identity, decolonization, and the Other through serious abstract analysis such as Maschino’s eventually became one of most important intellectual developments during the French-Algerian War. It is also reasonable to say that such efforts would leave enduring paradigms for understanding human identity, paradigms that continue to inform discussions of identity today.
Jacques Berque: The Other, the Orient, and the Collège de France
Many readers familiar with Edward Said’s monumental work Orientalism might think that Said was the first writer to call European Orientalism into question. Although Orientalism is arguably the single most important book published on the subjects of power, knowledge, and identity vis-à-vis imperialism, Said was not the first to doubt Orientalism’s future. One of the most influential writers to announce the deconstruction of Orientalism was Jacques Berque. Not surprisingly, Berque’s questioning of Orientalism was tied directly to the decolonization of North Africa. The son of the wellknown French North African administrator and writer Augustine Berque, Jacques Berque testified, as did so many others (Camus, Daniel, Feraoun, Amrouche, Memmi) to a dual identity. Born French but raised in Algeria, he had firsthand experience with the problems of identity and assimilation well before the outbreak of the war. In a study written for the French government on March 1, 1947, “A Study for a New Political Method for France in Morocco,” Berque suggested that the French attempt to gain administrative acceptance among North Africans (Moroccans) did not place sufficient weight on the “soul” of the people. Because of the present-day “psychologism,” the project of assimilation was at an “impasse”: “In our system, in effect, there is no freedom for the Muslim to identify with us.”6 In order to compensate for the inability of Muslims to identify with the French, Berque suggested a systematic reform based on respect for the Muslim community. Unfortunately, liberalism as practiced in North Africa was analogous to a “political Esperanto which [was] impossible to undress.” Moreover, he added, “We have not affected anything in North Africa with our gardenvariety humanism [notre humanisme de jardiniers]” (9). Frankly, as he assessed the situation in 1947, the continuation of this brand of liberalism would lead directly to “our immediate eviction.”
Nearly ten years later, on December 1, 1956, as Berque addressed the crowd assembled to hear his inaugural address at the Collège de France, the truth of his early predictions had prevailed. Not only was the “political Esperanto” he had once claimed liberalism to be undergoing hostile attacks, but France had since lost both Tunisia and Morocco, entered into war in Algeria, and just faced the Suez crisis.7 Berque admitted in a later interview the awkwardness of delivering his inaugural address on assuming his chair in social history of contemporary Islam during the immediate aftermath of the Suez invasion. Talking about the “survival of a Franco-Arab future” in a room that was “black” and “charged with resentment” because of the recent debacle of the Anglo-French expedition and Gamal Abdel Nasser’s oratorical excesses presented a very arduous task.8
In the tense atmosphere imperiling the future of French-Arab relations, Berque tried to speak of reconciliation by offering a theoretical analysis of Arab identity and by arguing that reconciliation required true understanding of the Arab world. This understanding, he argued, needed to be founded on a better comprehension of the world in general. “Our world is no longer cantonal. It does not reward the virtues of the gardener. We have believed this too late! But the Maghreb is devouring ideas and men.” Hence Berque suggested to his audience that the task of addressing Islam today required caution and respect for historical demands. The present conditions required a special ability to live “in contact with these men [the Arabs].” Because Berque was a scholar, his contact with the Arabs obliged a twofold action on his part: long prodigious study and a “pact of sympathy and engagement” (7).
As a former “citizen of the Maghreb” and representative of the government in the Orient, Berque told the audience that his essential task of understanding and imparting knowledge about the Orient had not changed on entering the Collège. His coming to the Collège did signify a change in the way this knowledge would be acquired. Orientalism as it was traditionally practiced could no longer be justified because it was impossible to study “Arab civilizations without the support [concours] of the Arabs” (9). In short, the study of the Arabs and the Orient would have to be revamped because conventional Orientalism was methodologically outdated.
Since Berque was speaking of a new and more acute means of investigating sociological questions and since this new methodology was affected by current political conflicts, Orientalist methodology, or the “optic between the Orient and the West,” had to be reconsidered. To begin, scholars had to understand that the Arabs marked the beginning of their modern history with the end of World War I. Above all it was imperative to see that the West had played a negative role in the origins of the modern Arab world because Arabs now defined themselves against the West and in favor of the Orient. Cautioning his listeners not to fall into the trap of defining the Arabs through “gross definitions” such as “nationalism, pan-Islamism, fanaticism, xenophobia, or other comfortable labels,” he continued, “we must see that among them [chez lui] the reformism of some, the conservatism of others, the very progression of thinkers are very often only the effects of positions taken with regard to the West. Alterity, as our philosophers would say” (13).
Since alterity (Otherness) was a crucial aspect of the scholar’s study, Berque focused on his concerns for the representation of the Orient. The Orient was marked by its language (Arabic) and the influence of the “techniques of the industrial age” (14). In its attempt to maintain its identity, the Orient was able to use Western inventions such as the printing press and the radio against the inventors.9 In fact, he continued, the words that expressed the power, magic, and feelings of the Orient were transmitted with the help of these Western mechanical inventions, but these inventions had also since become characteristics of the Orient’s “personality.” Importantly, the Orient did not entirely abhor the appropriation and objectification of its personality by the West: “The Orient resents less than us this bite of the object, this bite of the Other, the creator among us of attention, objectivity and many other working dispositions.”
Nevertheless, this objectification by the researcher required a certain degree of intellectual honesty and epistemological clarity. For example, Berque argued, it was necessary to account for the observer’s social and investigative limitations. “The researcher is a man, [a man] from a certain place” (30) The social embeddedness and historicism of the observer, “I” in other words, could not be “neglected” without “hiding a lie.” As Berque said, “The I reappears here, or more to the point the we, so difficult to strip.” This raised a particularly important question for today’s researchers because there had been an “awakening” of the Oriental peoples, but they had not completely rejected Western civilization. Western researchers could still work toward reconciliation between the West and the Orient in North Africa if they could look dispassionately at the particularisms of culture in the Maghreb.
Unlike Sartre and others, Berque was not advocating universalism. For this reason, accounting for the particular context of analyses of the Oriental world, whether North Africa or Iraq, was all the more important because it was the first step in determining the “responsibilities” of the researcher toward his “country,” “science,” and himself. As a caveat to his listeners at the Collège, Berque argued that scholars had to distinguish between a citizen’s and a scientist’s responsibilities. This meant that researchers had to objectify their political positions with regard to their objects of study. This would not be easy because politics is omnipresent: “If the citizen’s initiative extends beyond all the parts of his methodological reserve, it is his business…. But in his research it is both fatal and vital for France, Arab countries, and civilization—everywhere he encounters politics in studying subjects equal to him [qui affrontent de pareils sujets]. He should neither hope for nor run from these encounters. He should distinguish between his personal opinion and his scientific opinion.”
Closing his inaugural address, Berque reaffirmed his belief that the “alliance” between the world of the Arabs and France was likely to endure through today’s turbulent conditions. The long history of friendship between the two civilizations and the successful penetration of French culture and language had, for better or worse, made this alliance possible. Most important, he showed his optimism that the Arab and European common “Hellenistic” heritage would be sufficient to mitigate existing hostilities. If it appeared paradoxical to reaffirm his belief in a Franco-Arab future given the current crises with Egypt and Algeria, this paradox legitimated the special task entrusted to him by the honor of his position at the Collège.
Two years later, in an article titled, “Arab Anxiety in Modern Times,” Berque continued his efforts to describe the relationship between the Orient and the West.10 By 1958, however, it was clear that his essential method-ological and social questions had shifted as a result of the war. For example, instead of demonstrating how a common heritage could join the Orient and the West, Berque concentrated on how this common heritage, expressed often by the West’s domination of the Orient, forced people in the Orient to struggle with their notion of selfhood. So deeply had the West entrenched itself in the psyche of the Oriental person that “In liberating itself from the West, the Orient conquers only its own demons. It passes from there to the positive critique of itself. Here we are in the current period. A new cycle is starting.”
With the commencement of the “new cycle,” a fundamental reevaluation and remaking of Arab identity was set in motion. Berque focused on the issue of time to demonstrate how the new cycle translated into Arab reevaluation of history in both traditional and temporal terms. The questioning of their tradition with respect to their newly projected future shattered the Arabs’ “authenticity” because it had been so closely allied with traditionalism. The traditionalism of their parents was now interpreted as a product of the West’s political usury. Hence politics—as history—was a product of Others and, as Maschino had also argued, the Others were the Europeans. Berque wrote:
Politics [was] plotted by Others. That is the horizon on which the Arabs’ eyes open. For him nature is Others… European history launched the ideas of liberty, equality, and revolution, in a profitable coincidence with valorization [mise en valeur] of the world. It only had to stomp its feet, according to the ancient image, for the legions of workers, consumers, retailers to crawl out of the earth to answer its call. Exactly in the inverse, the history of the Arab does not start until its first strike against the world is already inventoried, appropriated, tied up: hence, the Suez affair. The West’s denomination had even drawn a type of authenticity, and definitely its efficacy, from the scientific hold on the “fields of action” [champs d’action]. (100).
Since the Arabs, according to Berque, were to reappropriate history and the world, they would inevitably face an internal contestation of their own identity. Having long identified themselves with a world and a tradition appropriated by the West, the Arabs had had to battle against the external and psychological worlds that the West had penetrated equally. Hence, according to Berque, being curious about himself and about the Other (autrui) (101), the Arab found himself in a predicament that posed not only “sociological” questions but also “psychoanalytic” ones (102).
The Arab revolt, Berque concluded, was not merely a revolt against the individual who oppressed but also against the “destiny” that had created oppression. The Algerian revolution provided Arabs with a means to reconstruct an image of man that had been mutilated by oppression. The issue in Islamic societies such as Algeria, Berque noted, was that the Arab had been so deeply penetrated by the West that the present revolution had become “ontological” (106). Confronted with an ontological revolution, the Arabs’ search for authenticity forced a difficult choice between “idealizing” and “exorcizing” their “great past” (107), In other words, this ontological search for selfhood forced the Arab into a constant “interrogation of his essence” during which a defiance of Others represented his source of strength. As Berque stated it, “His force is his cry,” However, one question remained: “Would the Others [the Europeans] hear this cry of ardor and exile?” (107).
If Berque presented the problem of Algerian identity as a conflict between the Arab Self and Western Other, how did he explain violence? From this phenomenological standpoint, violence stemmed from the Algerians’ attempt to work through the internalized contradictions of identity, historical oppression by the Western Other, and internalized absence of historical time. The violence Algerians employed thus originated from an ontological rejection of the West’s external and internalized domination. The repudiation of the West was not without paradox because the Arab-Algerian struggle against the Otherness of the West was also a conflict with the very part of the West that had been internalized in Arab identity and had therefore become part of the Arabs’ fundamental ontology.
Understanding how to overcome the paradox required objective scientific precision with which the problem of difference and the cultural bifurcation of the Arabs’ ontology could be examined. In analyzing the revolution, violence, and identity in this way, Berque claimed, a methodological transition from ethnology to sociology had to be made. He acknowledged the social scientist’s indebtedness to Sartre’s phenomenological formulation of the concept of the Other, which had transformed modern social science. For example, the concept of the Other was a much needed tool for research on “ ‘Jews,’ ‘the proletariat,’ ‘Negroes,’ or ‘colonial peoples.’ ”11 Yet Berque hinted that Sartre’s formulation lacked methodological precision because modern social scientists still needed to distance themselves from the process of decolonization. The researcher’s inability to place an objective distance between him or her and his or her subject rendered the study of racism and difference extraordinarily onerous (24). Most important, Berque warned that the social scientists should not overlook the “lesson” to be learned from the current conflict: “It has already substantially altered the background to the study by substituting, in some measure, for the dialectic of origin and religion, a dialectic of nationality, which is not based on the ethnic factor but is already differentiated by class and party” (25).
Not all Islamic and Arab scholars agreed with Berque’s view that the problem of identity had to be understood in dialectical terms. For example, speaking about the position of the social scientist at a university colloquium held the week after the Mélouza massacre, Berque’s colleague at the Collège de France and a proponent of Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence, Louis Massignon, argued that the object of scientific inquiry should be the uncovering of “truth” and should prevent the “unleashing of blind violence that creates ‘its own truth’ through the refusal to understand ‘the Other.’ ”12 Indeed, according to Massignon, achieving peace would come through the “comprehension of the Other” as a “Stranger,” and only with a nondialectical concept of the Other could productive understanding of the Orient be achieved. In other words, reconciliation was still necessary and possible because by recognizing the “hospitality of the Other”—a recognition that came through working and living together—one could understand the truth of the social unity. Ultimately, this suggested that the problem of Algerian identity could not be represented as a violent, dialectical confrontation of the Algerian with the world and with history. On the contrary, the goal was not to understand violence, since violence was the obstacle to a peaceful agreement between the Arabs and the non-Arabs in Algeria.
To arrive at mutual comprehension of Otherness, according to Massignon, Arabs had to seek out common or communal ties through a relationship with “Strangers” or “Foreigners” based on “hospitality” and comprehension. In phenomenological terminology, Massignon’s representation of the Arabs as Other strove to minimize the possibility of conflict by putting the question of Algerian identity in the framework of the problem of “existing-for-Others.” For Berque, the problem of Arab identity could not be explained in terms of “hospitality” (existing-for-Others); it had to be seen primarily as a question of “existing-for-oneself.”
These differences between Massignon and Berque illustrate how central the issue of reconciliation remained for intellectuals concerned with the representation of Algerian identity; they show how intellectuals who believed in reconciliation suggested that difference was a positive, nonviolent artifact of identity. The opposition between Berque’s and Massignon’s conceptions of Otherness and interpretations of the Arab-European, West-Orient conflict is best shown in a direct debate between Massignon and Berque published by Jean-Marie Domenach in Esprit in October 1960.13 In this “dialogue,” moderated by Domenach, Berque extended his definition of the Arab in order to explain the growing distance between the Arabs (the Orient) and the European technological civilizations (the West). Berque again argued that, despite the Arabs’ desire to distinguish themselves from the Western world, they could not completely reject industrial civilization without remaining “eternally opposed to the Other.” And, since the Other’s (the European’s) civilization had so deeply entered the Arab world, this technological civilization could not be rejected because “in refusing the Other, they [were] refusing themselves” (1506).
Where did this leave Franco-Algerian reconciliation? To address this question both Berque and Massignon turned to genealogy, and, interestingly, both relied on the notion of monotheism to substantiate their claims. Berque argued that Arabs were bound to European civilization through a common Greco-Oriental heritage or culture; Massignon insisted that Europeans and Arabs were linked by a common Semitic and religious heritage. Hence, according to Massignon, respect for this common religious past mandated that a nonviolent, nonconfrontational understanding save the two peoples from rupture. Moreover, since the Arabs held three principles to be fundamental to their culture—the Abrahamic tradition, the spoken word, and the right of exile—it could not be true that the Algerians were incapable of showing “hospitality to the French colons,” nor could it be claimed that the Arabs had lost their respect for the spoken word (1519). These traits, Berque answered, had already been long lost and it was up to “us” (Westerners) to restore this “plentitude.” In other words, Massignon’s notion of a common Franco-Algerian culture based on religious monogenesis would restore reconciliation, while for Berque reconciliation was a remnant of the past and a disguise for the Western status quo.
Refining and Defining Otherness
Orientalists and Islamic scholars were not alone in assessing the impact of the French-Algerian War on Algerian society and identity. In fact, the French anthropologist (and later a sociologist) Pierre Bourdieu—who returned to Algeria to teach at the University of Algiers after fulfilling his military service there—offered an important contribution to the identity debates. The young agrégé in philosophy from the E`cole Normale Supérieure and student of Raymond Aron surged into these debates over Algerian culture and identity in 1958 with the publication of his highly praised Sociologie de l’Algérie (The Algerians).14
In his structural attempt to depict Algerian society, Bourdieu could not have agreed more with Berque’s call for scientific precision. To make his analysis more precise, Bourdieu diagnosed Algerian identity by introducing the terms “acculturation” and “deculturation.”15 Taking the debate over identity still further, he also divided Algerian society anthropologically into four main peoples—the Kabyles, the Schwia, the Mozabites, and the Arabicspeaking—to show how a “kaleidoscopic mechanism” had both united and separated Algerians. According to him, the diversification of ethnic groups within Algeria created separate Algerian cultures with “intense cultural interpenetration” (93). The war had bonded the three groups behind the common front of nationalism, which had objectively transformed Algerian society. Put simply, the war had irrefutably affected the kaleidoscopic mechanism because the different ethnic groups—which had historically attempted to differentiate themselves from one another—were now motivated by a desire to dissimilate themselves from the Europeans. In other words, the war and the colonial situation had “aided in breaking down the particularisms and fostered the development of national consciousness” (94n2).
Bourdieu’s concern for Algerian identity and nationalism, however, linked him in important ways to Massignon and Berque. The Algerians, Bourdieu wrote, exhibited a “stage personage” (96). Similar to Massignon’s argument, Bourdieu suggested that this stage personage required that Algerians “reveal to others not one’s inmost being but a semblance of oneself.” As a result, Bourdieu wrote, the Algerian was primarily understood as a “being who exists for others [être pour autrui].” This formula was exemplified by the notion of honor because it symbolized constant scrutiny or the act of being constantly subjected to the gaze of others. As an individual, the Algerian was “also ‘a being who exists through others’ [être par autrui], who is, as it were, the point of intersection of many relationships, and who has much difficulty in thinking of himself as an autonomous personality” (96).
Because Algerians were inspired by a profound sense of communalism and were capable of existing for and through others, Bourdieu insisted that pinpointing the source of the current conflict required grasping how individuals acted as social conduits. The social conflict in Algeria—the rebellion—was not merely the culmination of the kaleidoscopic forces uniting against European domination, nor was it a unique outgrowth of individual passions. Then, if the conflict could not be explained uniquely in terms of a change in the kaleidoscopic forces or as a reaction against colonialism, could Islam—as many intellectuals believed—be held responsible? According to Bourdieu, despite the fact that the Islamic “imprint” was clearly legible within Algerian society, it was wrong to see Islam as the “determining or predominate cause of all cultural phenomena,” just as it would be wrong “to consider contemporary Western religion as being merely a reflection of the economic and social structures” (108). Thus, although several factors linked the irruption of the war to individual concerns, he located the real source in the totality of Algeria’s objective social structures.
About the same time that Bourdieu published The Algerians, Germaine Tillion made one final effort, in Les Ennemis complémentaires (France and Algeria: Complementary Enemies), published in 1960, to ensure peace by trying to clarify the meaning of Algerian identity. Without a doubt, according to her, the revolution had created “cruel evils,” which had only “one cure: it [was] called reconciliation.”16 One of the problems her work underscored was growing division among intellectuals.17 Moreover, Tillion believed that to end the war and work toward reconciliation required reexamining the most fundamental distinction of human identity: division between “We and the Others” (60). Tillion stated that Otherness was a universal phenomenon and therefore just as applicable from village to village within France as between nations, cultures, religions, and races. Nevertheless, she also acknowledged that time was running out. She began by distinguishing herself from the phenomenological method and, without attacking it directly, left little room to doubt that she questioned the division between Algerians and the French based on the “Self-Other” dialectic. In attacking this dialectical distinction, she revisited the idea of universal humanism:
Each human being’s conception of the relations—both real and ideal—that unite or oppose him to the rest of humanity is the profound basis of his personality.
Once—and that situation still survives, here and there—humanity was divided into two coherent and stable groups: Weandthe Other.
We: an entity not to be judged, or seen, and in which each individual melts like a piece of sugar in hot coffee; the Others: unknown monsters who don’t talk “like everyone else,” who eat disgusting food, who pray the wrong way, who dress absurdly, do unexpected things….
In 1960, what is We? We French? We workers? We intellectuals? We owners of fifty acres? We officials of such and such a grade? We African Negroes, or Senegalese, or citizens of Mali? We champions of the West against other cardinal points of the compass? We Marxists? We pacifists? We career soldiers? We Mormons? (60–61)
What had happened historically, according to Tillion, was that the growth of the “We’s” had fractured and disconnected universal society. However, because today’s world required more than ever the global coming together of individual societies and nations, it was nearly impossible to avert the impending “shipwreck” of humanity. She warned that for democracy to survive, the “rights of the human being” had to be protected (68). France’s problem as it faced the Algerian question, she continued, was that it was not ready for “Volume Two of human history” (69).
Volume Two of human history challenged universal humanism because individuals at this stage lost their prior importance. Overshadowed by the uncontrollable crowds, which were led by a smaller number of leaders, individuals could not protect themselves from the vicissitudes of war. Moreover, this new historical stage also presented problems for France, Tillion acknowledged, because it had been outflanked by “the stupendousness of giant nations” (the United States, the Soviet Union, and China) (82). Nevertheless, even with France’s declining status in the world, Tillion’s vision of “human history” was unquestionably Francocentric. “France,” she wrote, was “tired of playing the boogeyman, and I believe she possesses all that the peoples of Africa are seeking: the rich language, well established in every latitude, a civilization open to the future, the vitality necessary for the creative ferment to continue” (84).
Hence, despite her pessimistic appraisal of France’s position relative to the “giant nations,” she still believed (in a maternalistic or paternalistic sense, but many Algerian intellectuals agreed with her) that “Africans” and the citizens of the Third World looked to France for cultural, linguistic, and political inspiration. And, as if her Francocentrism were not already enough to make African and Algerian nationalists uneasy, she claimed that Paris was the “master trump” of French civilization: “Whereas France finds herself outdistanced by giants unknown to the foregoing centuries, Paris remains the capital of the world” (84).
Tillion acknowledged that Algerians, victimized by oppression from nearly every angle, had clearly distanced themselves from France.”18 Algerians desired revenge. The problem was that reconciliation and friendship were no longer the primary issues. The most important matter was peace, and for peace to be achieved it was necessary to negotiate with the enemy (the FLN). In other words, although Tillion insisted that the French ought to maintain an open dialogue with Algerians because France was the bearer of universal human rights, she had finally realized that reconciliation could not be achieved without peace and that, to arrive at peace, France had to compromise and acknowledge a separate and different Algerian identity. This did not mean that there could be no true friendships between Algerians and French, but the friendships that did exist were marked by a distant “theoretical character” between the French left in Paris and the Algerian nationalists in Algeria (177).
The theoretical character the friendship between the Algerians and French had acquired (and which Tillion clearly regretted) was perhaps best exemplified by Sartre’s representation of the Algerians as Other. Even before Tillion’s comments, Sartre’s former colleague at Les Temps modernes, philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, had already warned in 1955 of Sartre’s dangerous and politicized use of the concept of Otherness as a means to unveil the dynamic of history. As he wrote about Sartre and the Other in Les Aventures de la dialectique (Adventures of the Dialectic):
In going from personal history or literature to history, Sartre does not for the time being believe that he is meeting a new phenomenon which demands new categories. Undoubtedly he thinks that history, like language in his view, does not pose metaphysical questions which are not already present in the problem of the other. The class “other” is so established a phenomenon that the individual other is always in competition with it…. Is not action made up of relations, supported by categories, and carried on through a relationship with the world that the philosophy of the I and the Other does not express?19
Hence, in Wittgensteinian fashion, Merleau-Ponty called into question the ability of the concept of the Other to envelop the reality of the phenomenological worldview of the individual.
Merleau-Ponty suggested that Sartre’s specific use of the concept as a means to explain reason in history was racked with ulterior motives. Sartre’s newfound concern for history explained his use of the Other, and the philosophy of commitment, in this sense, merged and determined Sartre’s in-terpretation of history. Alterity, in other words, was a means for Sartre to steer a clear course through an otherwise unclear historical process. Sartre
decides to look to history only for the illumination of a drama whose characters—the I and the Other—are defined a priori by means of reflection. By taking as his own the gaze that the least-favored casts on our society, by his willingness to see himself through these eyes, by extending an open credit of principle to the party and the regime that claim kinship with the least-favored, Sartre seems to have the greatest concern for the Other. But Sartre hides his reasons from the Other. (195).
Sartre used the Other conceptually, according to Merleau-Ponty, in order to invent independence of consciousness, which “justifies,” “limits,” and “terminates” the Other’s intervention in the life of the I.
By July 1958, Merleau-Ponty went so far as to claim that both Sartrian and right-wing radicalism, if unchecked, would produce fascism in France as they had in Algeria. If we are to take Merleau-Ponty’s warning seriously, it is essential to look at Sartre’s most important theoretical work written during the war, volume 1 of the Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason).20
Critique tells us a great deal about why Sartre appropriated the Algerians as Other to prove that a negation of a negation (the destruction of colonialism’s destruction) was an affirmation. It also reveals how Sartre combined several problems (ontology, violence, and class) in an effort to have Algerian nationalism stand for the Marxian view of history: “There is in fact a deep relation of ontological identity, of practical ubiquity and of contradiction in movement; and, as a developing process, this is what, in Marxism, is called proletarian self-emancipation” (692).
In order to lay the foundations for the proletariat’s self-emancipation, Sartre distinguished between analytical (scientific) and dialectical reason. He claimed: “Scientific research can in fact be unaware of its own principal features. Dialectical knowledge, in contrast, is knowledge of the dialectic” (20).21 This meant that dialectical reason alone could penetrate the contours of history. This assertion was epistemologically critical for Sartre because, in order to properly understand man’s relationship with history and with the world, it was essential to understand that true knowledge came through dialectical, not analytical, reason. Placing dialectical reason over analytical reason thus had tremendous implications for “man.” Specifically, the dialectic overpowered man at the same time that man empowered it. Going yet further, Sartre argued that there was “no such thing as man; there [were] people, wholly defined by their society and by the historical moment” (36). In short, Sartre combined historicism and particularism with historical universalism by arguing that while there were “several collectivities, several societies,” there was only “one history,” which was “woven out of millions of individual actions.”
Sartre explained how historicism and universalism had produced the French-Algerian War, but the war was only one aspect of the totalizing essence of history. The Algerian, as a colonized Other, participated in a particular revolution that belonged to one history. Sartre used “Other” to explain the colonists’ capitalistic exploitation of Algerian “natives,” and that this exploitation permanently suspended the colonial situation in a dialectic of violence. However, in Hegelian fashion, Sartre concluded that the dialectic of logic created a situation in which the colonialist and the Algerians were Other:
The only possible way out was to confront total negation with total negation, violence with equal violence; to negate dispersal and atomization by an initially negative unity whose content would be defined in struggle: the Algerian nation. Thus the Algerian revolution, through being desperate violence, was simply an adoption of the despair in which the colonists maintained the natives; its violence was simply a negation of the impossible, and the impossibility of life was the immediate result of oppression. Algerians had to live, because colonialists needed a sub-proletariat, but they had to live at the frontier of the impossibility of life because wages had to be as close as possible to zero. The violence of the rebel was the violence of the colonist; there was never any other. The struggle between the oppressed and the oppressors ultimately became the reciprocal interiorization of a single oppression: the prime object of oppression, interiorizing it and finding it to be the negative source of its unity, appalled the oppressor, who recognized, in violent rebellion, his own oppressive violence as a hostile force taking him in turn as its object. And against his own violence as Other, he created a counter-violence which was simply his own oppression become repressive, that is to say reactualized and trying to transcend the violence of the Other, in other words, his own violence in the Other. (733)
As Sartre argues in this complicated passage, the violence of the Algerian revolution originated in the original sin of colonialism (read capitalism). The only possible escape from colonial oppression for the Algerians as Other was to battle against the colonial Other’s praxis of violence, which was part and parcel of the “process of exploitation” (733). Under these conditions where the dynamic of the dialectic required the violent psychological and physical confrontation between the colonial Other and the Algerian as Other, reconciliation would be impossible because radical difference was an essential characteristic of history. Hence, in Hegelian fashion, the dialectic of violence and counterviolence doomed the colonial situation to self-destruction because the oppressed would undoubtedly consume the oppressor. In this case, the concept of the Other abstracted the Algerians from their particular revolutionary setting and contextualized their historical struggle against colonialism as one step in the culmination of history and reason. Since all violence with regard to colonialists was selfreferential, pointing back to the original violence of capitalist oppression and colonial domination, the violence of the “native” (Sartre’s term) was automatically qualified and venerated through dialectics and through history.
In response to Sartre’s celebration of dialectical reason and violence, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss devoted the final chapter, “History and the Dialectic,” of La Pensée sauvage (The Savage Mind) to refuting Sartre’s theory. Lévi-Strauss’s bout with Sartre was in many ways his only significant contribution to the debates over the decolonization of Algeria.”22 According to Lévi-Strauss, Sartre’s Critique mostly demonstrated that Sartre employed sloppy logic and that he had misunderstood the distinction between analytical and dialectical reason. What angered Lévi-Strauss the most was Sartre’s claim that the scientists utilized only analytical reason. In reply, Lévi-Strauss insisted that the “savage mind” could only be understood by anthropologists via dialectical reason because “it is in this intransigent refusal on the part of the savage mind to allow anything human (or even living) to remain alien to it that the real principle of dialectical reason is to be found.”23
Equally important, Lévi-Strauss attacked Sartre’s separation of dialectical and analytical reason. According to Lévi-Strauss, dialectal reason accompanied analytical reason and could not be understood as existing independently. This distinction was especially important because it pointed to a disciplinary polemic between Lévi-Strauss as an anthropologist and Sartre as a philosopher over the constitution of “man.” Sartre claimed that his dialectical method showed how humans were constituted, whereas Lévi- Strauss argued that the human sciences were supposed not to “constitute, but dissolve man.” Hence Sartre aimed to refashion human identity while Lévi-Strauss only wanted to examine it. “The preeminent value of anthropology,” according to Lévi-Strauss, was “that it represents the first step in a procedure which involves others” (247). The problem with Sartre’s dialectics, then, was that in constituting man Sartre had given a nonterrestrial quality to history. According to Lévi-Strauss, Sartre’s vision of history, in this sense, posited history as something that was not of this world and possessed metaphysical qualities:
Seen in this light, therefore, my self is no more opposed to others than man isopposed to the world: the truths learnt through man are “of the world,” and they are important for this reason. This explains why I regard anthropology as the principle of all research, while for Sartre, it raises a problem in the shape of a constraint to overcome or a resistance to reduce. And indeed what can one make of peoples “without history when one has defined man in terms of dialectic and dialectic in terms of history? Sometimes Sartre seems tempted to distinguish two dialectics: the “true” one, which is supposed to be that of historical societies, and a repetitive, short-term dialectic, which he grants so-called primitive societies while at the same time placing it very near biology.
This imperils his whole system, for the bridge between man and nature which he has taken such pains to destroy would turn out to be surreptitiously reestablished through ethnography, which is indisputably a human science and devotes itself to the study of these societies. (248).
Lévi-Strauss continued, ridiculing Sartre’s politically motivated appropriation of the Algerian people:
Alternatively Sartre resigns himself to putting a “stunned and deformed” humanity on man’s side… but not without implying that its [the Algerian people’s] place in humanity does not belong to it in its own right and is a function only of its adoption by historical humanity: either because it has begun to internalize the latter’s history in the colonial context, or because, thanks to anthropology itself, historical humanity has given the blessing of meaning to an original humanity which was without it. Either way the prodigious wealth and diversity of habits, beliefs, and customs is allowed to escape. (248–49).
According to Lévi-Strauss, who had argued that anthropology possessed the key to understanding man, Sartre’s dishonesty neglected the originality of Algerian culture and beliefs and replaced Algeria’s real place in the world within a supposed historic place. History as prophesied by Sartre ignored local Algerian cultures under the pretext that the Algerian revolution was a step in the longer dialectical process. In fact, according to Lévi-Strauss, rather than making the process of history philosophically transparent, Sartre’s use of history and Third World cultures demonstrated that he was merely a “prisoner of his own Cogito.” More to the point, Lévi-Strauss claimed that Sartre mixed ontological questions with Marxian notions of class struggle and history, and Sartre’s use of the French-Algerian War left one conclusion: “To the anthropologist… this philosophy (like all the others) affords a first-class ethnographic document, the study of which is essential to an understanding of the mythology of our time” (249n).
Unfortunately this Marxist “mythology” also posed serious epistemological problems, especially relating to the problem of Otherness. As Lévi-Strauss pointed out, it was wrong to conclude that “others are wholly dialectical” simply because “knowledge of others is dialectical” (250). This problem became clearer when one looked at Sartre’s confusion over the type of history—history as analysis or history as life. Speaking more directly about the problem of history and addressing the idea of history as presentday “mythology,” which made use of Others, Lévi-Strauss showed how dialectical theory as advanced by Sartre ultimately, if not ironically, turned against itself. Since “truth” depended on context, it was impossible to locate and isolate truth historically before it disappeared. This was clearly a problem for today’s left, he continued, because “[t]he so-called men of the Left still cling to a period of contemporary history” that bestows “the blessing of a congruence between practical imperative and schemes of interpretation” (254).
In effect, Lévi-Strauss was caricaturing Sartre’s notion of intellectual legitimacy because Lévi-Strauss was directly attacking the French left’s notion of political commitment, or praxis. For example, rather than clarifying problems with history, the left’s praxis rendered it impossible to see necessary distinctions between the past and the present. This was because history had become intertwined (hence confused) with the intellectuals’ conceptions of their own identity.
Because historical knowledge had merged with the individual’s own “inner sense” of time and continuity, “it appears to reestablish our connection, outside ourselves, with the very essence of change” (256). But this was only an “illusion” based on the “demands of social life.” These demands (the idea of political commitment and the desire to make sense out of the world, for instance) meant that history had to be understood as “historyfor” (257). This was a critical point because this very conception of historyfor explained the penchant of the French left to appropriate local or national histories, to cast them into the global or transcultural Geist of history. In a footnote, Lévi-Strauss summed up the problem of history-for:
Quite so [“History is therefore never history, but history-for”] will be the comment of the supporters of Sartre. But the latter’s whole endeavor shows that, though the subjectivity of history-for-me can make way for the objectivity of history-for-us, the “I” can still only be converted into “we” by condemning this “we” to being no more than an “I” raised to the power of two, itself hermetically sealed off from the other “we’s.” The price so paid for the illusion of having overcome the insoluble antinomy (in such a system) between myself and others consists of the assignation, by historical consciousness, of the metaphysical function of Other to the Papuans. By reducing the latter to the state of means, barely sufficient for its philosophical appetite, historical reason abandons itself to the sort of intellectual cannibalism much more revolting to the anthropologist than real cannibalism. (257–58n).
The obvious problem for understanding Otherness, according to Lévi-Strauss, was that for dialecticians such as Sartre, whose work attempted to discredit scientific knowledge, history would be appropriated to fulfill the “demands of social life.” In appropriating history in this manner, Sartre had rendered understanding between Others impossible and cast the Other as a concept into the mold of a useless metaphysical abstraction that held no claim on historical truth. Asserting his own professional and intellectual legitimacy, Lévi-Strauss argued that it was up to the anthropologists to bring out the historical dimensions and the reasons behind the expansion of this Marxist “mythology” within the modern French left.
Seasoned academic contemporaries such as Raymond Aron understood the importance of Sartre’s and Lévi-Strauss’s debate about the representation of the Other for French intellectuals. But in his 1973 Histoire et dialectique de la violence (History and the Dialectic of Violence)—originally given as a series of lectures at the Collège de France in the early 1960s—Aron disagreed with both men because they had oversimplified the issue.24 He agreed that Sartre’s dialectical attempts to understand the Other were probably useful if one wanted to find “meaning and salvation in an existence that to ourselves seemed noise and perdition” (184). Yet, because Sartre’s method emphasized an ontology and an epistemology based on praxis or constituting dialectic, which meant the dialectic of individual consciousness, it was theoretically flawed because Sartre had fatally merged the idea of intellectual praxis with Third World violence. Furthermore, it was entirely disingenuous, according to Aron, for a writer or intellectual to attempt, by pen, to create a dialectic of violence without suffering threat of torture or violence to himor herself. Aron pointed out that of the French intellectuals in Paris it was Francis Jeanson, not Sartre, who through his contacts with the FLN had truly been able to effectuate intellectual praxis. Even worse, Sartre’s ontological understanding of the world “would condemn the historian or ethnographer, as Sartre reproaches Lévi-Strauss, to see only himself in the other or to see only the other with respect to himself, and consequently to destroy what constitutes for the historian or the ethnographer their task and reward par excellence, which is to succeed in keeping their distance from their own ego or, in other words, to recognize alterity” (197).
As a practicing social scientist, Aron claimed that he could not leave Sartre’s contemptuous, praxis-based attack on analytical reason and the positive sciences unanswered. Aron insisted that Sartre, by placing too much emphasis on praxis and dialectal reason, had misunderstood the possible contributions analytical reason could make to debates over identity and consciousness. However, on this issue, he was not aiming his criticisms only at Sartre. Lévi-Strauss, he argued, “dreams of a science of man comparable in its structure to a science of insects or microbiology. At the end of The Savage Mind he upholds, at least hypothetically, a materialism that establishes the possibility of a science” (204). Hence Sartre and Lévi-Strauss, Aron pointed out, were unwittingly connected through their emphasis on historical materialism.25 The difference between them was that for Sartre the “ontological primacy of praxis leads to the primacy of understanding or dialectical Reason,” whereas for Lévi-Strauss the “epistemological and perhaps the ontological primacy of structures” had skewed the real meaning of lived experience (205).
If Sartre’s insistence on praxis, Lévi-Strauss’s reliance on structuralism, and Aron’s search for an alternative way of knowing and dealing with Otherness left important questions unanswered, was there a better way to explain the relationship between human identity, alterity, and violence? Of the other scholars who addressed the problem of alterity during the war, perhaps no one was more concerned with this question than Emmanuel Levinas. One year after Sartre’s publication of Critique, Levinas’s 1961 Totalité et infini (Totality and Infinity) conceptualized the Other without the violence implicit in the Hegel-Heidegger-Sartre dialectic. Although he never, so far as I have been able to find, mentioned the Algerians specifically in reference to the Other, Levinas’s epistemological and ethical theories point to an alternative to dialectical violence discussed often in reference to colonial warfare. His work, above all, represents the antithesis of Sartre’s vision of war as emancipation: “War is not only one of the ordeals—the greatest—of which morality lives; it renders morality derisory.”26
War, according to Levinas, had particularly serious repercussions for the problem of identity because war “suspended morality” and so threw human identity into chaos:
The trial by force is the test of the real. But violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action. Not only modern war but every war employs arms that turn against those who wield them. It establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. War does not manifest exteriority and the other as other; it destroys the identity of the same. (21).
Consumed by the importance of war in 1961, Levinas shared Lévi-Strauss’s concern about a totality in which violence answered to violence. For both Lévi-Strauss and Levinas, Sartre’s view of totality and history her-metically sealed off the Other from other Others, thus reducing the individual to stasis. In other words, in a totality where the “ultimate meaning counts,” the individual’s actions would appear “in the already plastic forms of the epic” (22). This ontological plasticity denied individuals responsibility for their actions, and it proposed that violence would be part of the “epic” of imperial warfare.
This point was critical because the West was experiencing a crisis of morality that directly affected the lives of the colonized. “The peace of empire issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to alienated beings their lost identity.” Philosophers confronting empire had to reintroduce the idea of infinity to address the issues of identity and morality. Levinas did this by concentrating on eschatological meaning, which allowed individuals to think of their relations with other individuals as “being beyond the totality or beyond history, and not as being beyond the past and the present.” Eschatology was even more important because it alone could extract humans from the “totality of wars and empires” (23). By focusing on the “vision” of eschatology and the Cartesian notion of infinity, Levinas understood subjectivity as being rooted in the very notion of infinity. The goal, Levinas argued, in moving away from the violence of totality was to illustrate how subjectivity allowed for and, in fact, mandated “welcoming the other, as hospitality” (27).27
Moreover, directly opposed to Sartre, Levinas argued that the concept of infinity, not totality, allowed for the possibility of “activity and theory” (27). This was a crucial point because Levinas also challenged the idea of praxis. It was also important because Levinas wanted to ensure that consciousness would not be thought of as equating “being with representation.” In specific reference to Heidegger, Levinas here was trying to avoid the ontological reduction of the Other to the same. Again, the idea of infinity, which meant acknowledging the Other’s radical and insurmountable stance, was, according to him, the only way to arrive at the possibility of ethics.
Levinas also opposed Sartre’s fundamental ontology as presented in Being and Nothingness because Sartre’s ontology deprived “the known being of its alterity” (42). However, there were parallels between Levinas and other thinkers discussed above. For example, Lévi-Strauss believed that Sartre’s use of ontology posed a danger because Sartre always placed the Other in a position sealed off from others. Similarly, Levinas argued that ethics required both recognition of and respect for the Other, even at the expense of individual freedom. The idea of freedom from Others posed substantial problems for the possibility of ethics, and Levinas demanded that this idea be eradicated prima facie.
Most important, Levinas claimed, the issue of the Other had been wrongly analyzed by Sartre, especially the later Sartre of the Critique. Violence was not attributable to the Self-Other dialectic. Violence represented the breakdown of the moral code, not the celebration of man’s all-ornothing question for humanity. The reason for this was simple. For Levinas, ethics were derived from the calling into question of “my spontaneity by the presence of the Other” (42). This prohibited the reduction of the Other to the same via the concept of Being and thus opened the possibility of ethics by calling Sartre’s very notion of history into question. “When man truly approaches the Other he is uprooted from history” (52). History was therefore not a dialectical source of conflict but something to overcome.
In the same way, Jacques Berque offered his own historical alternative to the radicalism of Sartrian philosophy. He did this by using the concept of the Other; however, unlike Sartre, he realized the danger (if not impossibility) of postulating the idea of a new identity through violence. Rather than neglecting the Arab-Islamic dimensions of decolonization, Berque analyzed them historically. As the French-Algerian War concluded, Berque’s Le Magreb entre deux guerres (1962) (French North Africa: The Maghrib Between Two World Wars) offered the most comprehensive analysis of Algerian and North African history. Distancing himself from intellectuals such as Sartre, Berque claimed that the problem confronting many intellectuals was that they were acting in “bad faith” by trying to shed their “imperialistic egoism” while “identifying themselves with ‘the Other,’ which implies the failure to recognize this difference.”28 Perhaps this bad faith (Sartre’s, for example) could be reduced, he suggested, to epistemological imperialism or to a misunderstanding of history, especially the meaning of modernity. Since modernity was marked by “mutual exchange and conflict,” the very division between observer and observed had been altered to the point that it was “no longer valid” (16). Hence the idea of difference had become both stronger and weaker: stronger in that conflicts such as the French-Algerian War highlighted distinctions between the West and North Africa and weaker in that the principle of self-awareness reminded “mankind of its unity.”
Even more pressing, Berque wrote, since colonialism and decolonization had become the most important questions of the twentieth century, intellectuals’ approaches to these issues would seriously affect their own future. As long as Muslims and Europeans continued to deny each other’s place in the history of decolonization, there would be little possibility of resolving some of the fundamental questions now confronting everyone (99). This did not mean that North Africans were not affected, which Sartre tended to argue, by their religious considerations. For example, in writing about Tunis in 1961, Berque noted that “The very appearance of the town thus reminds us immediately of that key which serves to interpret the whole of contemporary Islam: a two-fold questioning of The Other and of oneself” (189). Berque explained this in basic terms such as the very visible effort of changing the names of streets from “Rue de l’Église” to “Rue de la Mosquée” (190).
Berque, who had learned his historical methods from the Annales school, took great pains not to erase or generalize the historical and local dimensions of North African history. This put him in direct opposition to Sartre’s ahistorical method, which worked from the general to the specific in an extremely functionalistic manner. Berque was concerned with a history of the relationship between Europe and North Africa, but he did not believe eliminating Europe and European culture from North Africa could create an entirely new North Africa. Yet Berque did think that “European domination merely reflected, and to a certain extent usurped, the expansion of technical culture. Now this expansion brought with it social and mental relations historically in advance of the civilization which it affected…. The so-called ‘civilizing’ character of colonization resulted not only from its direct achievements but still more from the reactions it aroused in the native population” (331). Consequently, nationalism had to be understood as a response to domination linked to technical culture—a view that incidentally directly contradicted Tillion’s. In line with Aron’s criticism of Sartre, Berque continued, the problem with the French was that, reared in “the French Jacobin tradition, they were saved from chauvinism only by an internationalism itself in advance of nationalist aspirations.” This helped explain the historical move of the French left to internationalist aspirations for the colonies and why many French leftists (and nationalist intellectuals such as Fanon) had misunderstood the real (local) dimensions of the conflict.
Despite the various misunderstandings of the French left and nationalists, it was really the local European settler community, the “administrators, colons in Algeria and petit blancs” who undoubtedly “bore the blame, rather than France itself,” for the eventual eruption of the conflict in North Africa (383). By squandering their achievements and hoarding their privileges, the Europeans had been granted “carte blanche to exploit the country” (387). As many intellectuals had done throughout the conflict, Berque argued that two visions of France had grown up side by side in the Maghrib: the ideal of France and French civilization and the reality of the exploiting, abusive colonial France. The result of this contradiction was clear:
The day would come when the tension between the two would become intolerable; in other words, when the growing influence of French models, among them those of the Revolution and the Resistance, would have lost all plausible connection with the colonial situation. And then, as other hitherto repressed or down-trodden forces emerged, offended Arabism would unite with disappointed pro-French sympathies to produce a terrible explosion. (386).
The contradictions of the colonial situation, according to Berque, hinged on the problem of identity. The colons realized that they would have to adapt their identity to that of the local Algerian population, but they never completed the process. The Algerians were also alienated from the dominant colonial community and were thought of only as objects to be manipulated and whose land should be appropriated.29 Thus the Algerian was kept at a distance to be excluded as the Other, but that was precisely the problem with the colonial system. “Excluding any future for ‘the Other,’ it jeopardized its own future” (388).
Berque’s most important point was to demonstrate that the origins of the conflict were local concerns about colonialism in Algeria, not external ones such as the Middle East, pan-Arabism, and pan-Islamism. Although he did not deny the influence of the Middle East on the current crisis, he did insist that “the nationalist movement was based to a large extent on what it was fighting” (389). Since the nationalists fought against French colonialism and French repression, nationalism mirrored, in this sense, its French counterpart.
The systemic contradictions of colonialism and its sheer anachronism ultimately forced France to answer unanswerable questions. This did not mean, Berque concluded, that the “Latin” element (his word to describe the power politics of the Roman, and by extension French, empire) of the Maghrib would forever disappear (394). It was clear, Berque claimed, that there would be residues from colonialism that could not be resolved overnight. It was equally clear that, through its own stupidity, France had lost its hand in the region’s future. The Maghribi people were now in search of their own authentic identity. Without a doubt, Berque conceded, they would look toward the Middle East. Hence their search for authenticity had arrived at the all-important question of being, of identity. “For this reason, according to one ancient interpretation of the term jihad, holy war, their fight [was] not so much against ‘the Other’ as against them selves—against a certain aspect of themselves” (394–95).
Decolonization, Otherness, and the Question of Violence: Albert Memmi
In moving from analyses of the Other and alterity to general discussions of identity and violence during decolonization, it is helpful to keep in mind that there was a relationship between writings on the Other and writings on violence. In fact, in some cases, there was significant overlap because many intellectuals wrote on both subjects. The writings that follow concentrate primarily on the relationship of questions of identity and identity politics to anticolonial violence.
One of the most influential theoretical contributions to the question of identity vis-à-vis colonialism and decolonization was Albert Memmi’s Portrait du colonisé précéde du Portrait du colonisateur (The Colonizer and the Colonized), first published as two installments in 1957 in Les Temps modernes.30 Memmi’s influence extends well into present-day discussions of identity and, in many ways, subsequently informed the theoretical analysis of internalized and externalized responses to colonial oppression—the colonized’s and the colonizer’s. Before considering Memmi, however, it is instructive to consider the first appropriation of Memmi’s theories by Sartre because Sartre’s comments give us, once again, significant insights into a Marxian and militant anticolonialist’s uses of identity politics to justify revolutionary action. As will become clear, Sartre’s writings on Memmi tell us as much about the former as the latter.
In his introduction to Memmi’s book Sartre claimed that Memmi’s authority on the question of identity came from a hybrid identity that was “a twofold liability,” which meant that Memmi was simultaneously colonizer and colonized.31 Sartre approached Memmi directly from Memmi’s comments about himself. As a Tunisian Jew, Memmi admitted that he had been granted a higher civil status than Muslims in North Africa—yet his status was lower than that of Christian Frenchmen. As a result, he claimed to know the colonizer from the inside almost as well as he knew the colonized. Not surprisingly, this so-called liability, according to Sartre, turned out to be a theoretical blessing because Memmi’s hybridized identity could “enlighten others through his self-examination: a ‘negligible force in the confrontation,’ he represents no one, but since he is everyone at once, he will prove to be the best of witnesses” (xxii).
In bearing witness, Sartre insisted that Memmi exhibited another extraordinary quality: Memmi could use his hybridity to transcend his particular colonizer-colonized identity and move toward the “universal” (xxii).32 Here Sartre adapted the familiar Hegelian dialectic and the Marxist notion of systems to the age-old Enlightenment claims of universal reason but with a slight twist: Memmi would carry readers toward not universal man but a “rigorous reason enforcing its claims on everyone.” Importantly, Sartre acknowledged that Memmi would not agree with his analysis of The Colonizer, and the Colonized because Memmi wrote of the particulars of identity, whereas Sartre aimed to “universalize” identity:
I have always thought that ideas take form from things and that the ideas are already within man when he awakens them and expresses them to elucidate his situation. The colonizer’s “conservatism” and “racism,” his ambiguous relations with the mother country—such things are given first, before he revives them into Negro complexes.
Memmi would no doubt reply that he is saying nothing else. I know that. (Does he not say, “The colonial situation manufactures colonizers as it manufactures colonies”? The whole difference between us arises perhaps because he sees a situation where I see a system.) Moreover, perhaps it is Memmi who is right in expressing his ideas in the order of discovery; that is, starting with human intentions and felt relationships, he guarantees the genuineness of his experience. He has suffered first in his relations with others and in his relations with himself; he encountered the objective structure in thoroughly studying the contradiction that was rending him, and he delivers structure and contradiction up to us just as they are, raw and still permeated with his subjectivity. (xxv).
The genuineness of Memmi’s experience—the lived quality of his analysis—lent his writing stinging clarity. Thus, according to Sartre, writing of his personal suffering at the hands of others, especially the French, rendered Memmi’s Self and subjectivity transparent to readers. With this transparency Sartre was able to transform Memmi’s definition of the colonizer— as an illegitimate “usurper” who maintained power by denying the basic rights of the colonized in Algeria—into a systemic critique of colonialism.33 This would mean that the important issue for decolonization, according to Sartre, was not reconciliation but the necessity for the colonized to reclaim his identity, dignity, and power in his own country. In short, the first act of reconstituting colonized identity would be the replacement of reconciliation with rupture.
Indeed, Memmi’s analysis of colonial identity points out why rupture is so important. And at the forefront of this reconstitution of identity are the issues of time and representation, which made it easier for Sartre to take Memmi’s conception of history and translate it into a Hegelian notion of history. Being dehumanized by the situation, the colonized had been denied his place in history; unable to participate in public affairs, the colonized was outside “the game” (92). However, being forced out of history ultimately opened up for him the possibility for political subversion because the colonized had not internalized the crucial norms necessary for a functioning society such as citizenship. Hence, at the most fundamental level, the colonized and the colonizer did not conform to the same ideals of nationality and citizenship. In the end, according to Memmi, oppression and denial of basic rights were diseases that could not be remedied and destroyed colonial society’s ability to regenerate itself. And, more important, from within the dying structures of colonial society, the colonized youth faced the choice between absolute decay and absolute revolution.
Condemned to the eternal present and excluded from historical processes, the colonized became conscious of their situation through nationalist literature and language, which allowed “the colonized to resume contact with his interrupted flow of time and to find again his lost continuity and that of his history” (110). In the immediate case, Memmi admitted, plugging into the “lost continuity” was done with the colonizers’ language, French. Nevertheless, nationalist literature pushed the colonized back into time and unmasked the decay of colonial society. Ironically, Memmi wrote (as had Berque), colonialism was responsible for its own death because it had forced the colonized to live outside colonial society and, therefore, kept the colonized from exalting the colony. A foreigner in his own land, the colonized was “dropped off by the side of the road—outside of our time” (112).
For Memmi, placing the colonized back into historical time rendered the outdated politics of integration and pacification (Jacques Soustelle and Robert Lacoste respectively) purely illusory and had tremendous import for the question of identity. Perhaps, he admitted, assimilation might have been possible, but present conditions left the colonized only one option: he will revolt. Abandoning assimilation led to a “recovery of Self and of autonomous dignity” (128). Recovering the Self—as Aron had also once claimed in Opium of the Intellectuals—meant that the colonized would use the same techniques, the same demands for justice, that the colonizer used against him. Yet not all aspects of the reconstitution of identity were to be celebrated. For example, when the struggle to recapture the colonized Self turned violent, the colonized’s xenophobia and racism surfaced. This, Memmi argued, was not to be credited to the revolt; in fact, this new racism and xenophobia was self-delusory and was used to justify absurd and unnecessary aggression toward others, including those who have been colonized (130). In other words, the colonized had to exercise caution to fight against surges of rage that resulted from the same hatred of others that the colonizer used to justify colonial violence.34
The injustice of this excessive aggression toward others had to be understood as an effort to reconstitute the Self. The colonized, having shown repeatedly that he was not capable of assimilating into the dominant society, had come to define himself through the characteristics of difference. As a result, when the colonized asserted himself, he did so on this basis, because “those differences, after all, are within him and correctly constitute his true Self” (132). As the process of self-definition unfolded, the negative aspects of the colonized’s culture became positive. Notwithstanding this transformation, recovering fully from the sickness of colonialism required termination of the revolt and colonialism. Only at that point would the postcolonial framework provide the conditions necessary to rethink the relationship between France and its former colonies.
Memmi’s closing remarks suggested an alternative to total rupture. Since colonialism was ultimately a European disease, the Europeans could eradicate the sickness. As for the Algerians, overcoming the colonial situation meant that the colonized had to “reconquer himself,” to “cease defining himself through the categories of the colonizers” (152).35 Having achieved this basic freedom by using new categories to define himself, the colonized could achieve freedom from the tyranny of the colonizer’s concepts (and of the colonizer directly); the final step was to become a “free man” with all the “ups and downs” of freedom (153).
Memmi’s analysis of the colonial situation and the process of decolonization was an important event in the intellectual history of the French-Algerian War. As part of a larger movement by intellectuals to study the war through complex questions of identity, Memmi’s work, in many ways, marked an epistemological watershed for popularized discussions of the problem of identity and of analyses of difference.
Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre
In his L’An cinq de la révolution algérienne (A Dying Colonialism), published in French in 1959, Frantz Fanon acknowledged, like Memmi, that decolonization had brought unprecedented violence to Algeria and that this violence was a legitimate reaction against the French army and settler intransigence. Yet Fanon argued that regardless of the government’s efforts to dominate the Algerian people with “unlimited exploration of new means of terror,” the essential task at hand was to determine the degree to which Algerian identity and the Algerian nation had been born during the revolution.36 At every level, Algerian society was being remade: families, traditions, dissemination and production of information, settler politics, medical practices, and even metropolitan France, he argued, were now being “colonized by Algerian activists”—a claim that evoked Jeanson’s comments on the Algerianization of French intellectuals (150). Fanon’s Dying Colonialism also described Algerian society as a revolution within a revolution, and Fanon characterized this as being as inevitable as it was positive.
A year later Fanon addressed the problem of violence and identity in a speech delivered at Accra, Ghana.37 Speaking about both colonized people in general and Algerians in particular, he argued that the colonized’s violence could be understood as “three-dimensional” violence, whose components included everyday violence, violence aimed against the past, and violence aimed at the future impregnated with colonial oppression (4). The logic of this three-dimensional violence generated the need of the oppressed to overthrow the colonial regime by any means necessary. In this sense, violence was a manifestation of a basic interior, animalistic rage. The colonized’s violence, he said, was becoming, “very simply, a manifestation of his own animal existence. I say animal,” he continued, “and I am speaking as a biologist because such reactions are only… defens[ive] reactions, translating into the most banal instinct of self-preservation.” Since it was clear that the FLN and its principal spokesman, Fanon, were going to use revolutionary violence to achieve liberation, most French intellectuals who listened carefully understood that reconciliation was stillborn.
In 1961 Fanon plunged further into the identity debates with his bestknown work, Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth). Not surprisingly, as with Memmi’s The Colonized and the Colonizer, Sartre again used a Third World writer to make his case, this time for violence and against reconciliation.38 In many ways, Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth finalized the issue of reconciliation during the French-Algerian War. On the surface, Sartre’s stated motives for writing about the Algerians’ violence differed little from his motives in 1955 and 1956. What had changed was his perception of Algeria’s relationship to France. It was clear to Sartre that Algeria would become independent, and he believed (based on his relations with revolutionaries like Fanon) that Algerians wanted nothing to do with France or French culture. In 1961, after the Melun Conference in June 1960 and before the Evian Accords in February–March 1962, it was already evident that the FLN would reject all last-minute reconciliation efforts.39 However, since the colons and the French army refused to admit this and since their violence against the Algerians had gone into a frenzy, it was also evident to Sartre that violence and terrorism were the only means left to Algerians to rid themselves of European colonialism.
Despite his previous pro-reconciliation positions, Sartre no longer advocated protecting the ties between Europe and Algeria. In fact, there is a noticeable distance between French and Algerian culture in his preface. He freely admitted that the ties had to be broken, that the umbilical cord of identity had long since been poisoned by the blood of Western culture. Proof of this necessary break came, according to Sartre, when Algerians realized that they were recreating their identity—their manhood—through violence. This emancipative violence would come at the Europeans’ expense. “The child of violence, at every moment he [the ‘half-native’] draws from it his humanity. We were men at his expense, he makes himself man at ours: a different man; of higher quality.”40
Without question, Fanon’s work and Sartre’s preface to it are two of the most influential writings on violence written during the war. Everywhere in both works, identity surfaces to justify, confirm, and distinguish legitimate native violence from illegitimate colonial violence. Situated within the context of an impending independence, Sartre follows violence’s “boomerang” effect and offers a radical critique of the French left. In its purest form, the Algerians were using revolutionary violence of the “half-native” in order to “recreate” their identity (21). In recreating their identity, the ex-natives could force the Europeans to reevaluate European identity.
European identity aside, what was really important in Fanon’s work according to Sartre was that the Third World found itself and spoke “itself through his voice” (10). As the mouthpiece for the Third World, Fanon was the first person (except for Sorel) since Engels to delineate the process of history (14). The process of history, in turn, revealed the emergence of the dehumanized half-native as fulfilling a dialectical prophecy of violence that was a response to the original European oppression. Fanon’s text, as Sartre pointed out, completely reassessed the problem of Algerian identity. This is in fact what Fanon proposed in The Wretched of the Earth.
Fanon went the furthest of the theorists by hypothesizing that it was possible to erase colonial identity through anticolonial violence. In other words, the process of decolonization created a tabula rasa of human identity in Algeria. He said the revolution meant a “veritable creation of new men.”41 Not surprisingly, he also wrote that violence would be a fundamental aspect of the tabula rasa. “At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his Inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect” (94). The new men would reject all residues of Western culture. Wanting to destroy the boundary of identity that separated the colonizer from the native, the native would simply bury colonial society. For this reason, the native showed great enmity for “Western culture,” so much so that when he heard it mentioned he would pull “out his knife—or at least make, sure that it is within reach” (43).
Returning to his attacks against the French left who clung to Western values, Fanon argued that these leftists refused to admit that reconciliation was not possible. This was based on the simple truth that the liberals did not understand that once colonial exploitation was removed, Europeans would have no reason to remain in Algeria. Moreover, and more important, the liberals did not understand that the guiding ideas of Western liberalism— “the triumph of the human individual, of clarity, and of beauty—had become lifeless, colorless knickknacks” (47). Divorced from the brutal reality of violence that hid behind liberalism’s mask, these foundational ideas of liberalism were simply “dead words.” Europeans did have a role to play in the creation of the new men. Yet to be beneficial during decolonization “the European peoples must first decide to wake up and shake themselves, use their brains, and stop playing the stupid game of the Sleeping Beauty” (106). It is unclear what Fanon expected Europeans to do once they awakened.
He provided no incentives for them to have further dealings with the liberated “natives,” not even on the level of commerce. Perhaps Fanon, despite his hyperbole and revolutionary rhetoric, realized that the Third World was more dependent on the West than he would have wanted. Certainly he feared that the capitalist impulse would surge again in Algeria following the war. What he overlooked was the role violence would continue to play in postcolonial society. Hence, although he clearly feared that the Algerian bourgeoisie would mimic the old colonial regime (171), he showed no concern about the possibility that Algerians would mimic the extreme revolutionary violence of the FLN for years to come.42
In essence, Fanon wanted to avoid the possibility of giving birth to a stillborn revolution that would replicate the capitalistic social ills of colonial society, but he remained blind to the long-term effects of the revolutionary violence on Algerian identity. Instead he focused on how the prosperity of the revolution would be ensured by the people who were the revolution; with this in mind, the intelligentsia in underdeveloped countries had to educate the masses politically and socially. In opposition to European liberalism and reminiscent of the rhetoric of Robespierre and Saint Juste, Fanon argued that, in this new society, the talented or “exceptional” individual could not be cultivated because the goal was to “uplift the people” (197). Curiously, like the Enlightenment credo that suggested that men became men through rationality, in Fanon’s logic Algerians were not fully human until they had been converted to the revolutionary creed: “We must develop their brains, fill them with ideas, change them and make them into human beings.”43 Not surprisingly, this political education required ethnicity, or what Fanon called “tribes,” to be checked. The “tribalization of central authority” and an “ethnic dictatorship” could destroy the revolution. Hence the revolutionary intellectuals and politicians would have the difficult task of educating the masses, blocking “tribalization” of authority, and preventing the growth of a national bourgeoisie.
The ultimate product to be achieved in the aftermath of liberation was the construction of a national culture, not adoption of pan-African, pan-Arab, or pan-Islamic culture. As such, Algeria’s politicians and intellectuals would have to exhibit care regarding the reappropriation of history, especially if it concerned Islam and African culture. The move back to Islam, Arabism, and Africanism resulted from the past colonial lies about the history of the country before colonial conquests. It was understandable, according to Fanon, that men would be drawn to these movements as unifying forces. But the Algerian nationalist leaders would have to consider extranational histories and movements without losing sight of the nation. If they did prefer African unity over nationalism, they would have been hopelessly led up a “blind alley” (214). Here Fanon’s conception of Algerian identity was an artifact of his revolutionary theory. Selfhood was, for him, the expression and the lifeline of the revolution. The nation depended in toto on the Self’s identification with it. Self-consciousness and self-awareness were, therefore, essential to national culture: “The consciousness of Self is not the closing of a door to communication. Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee. National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension” (247).
If self-consciousness was the determining factor in nationalism, revolutionary violence was simply part of the natural and emancipative logic of the French-Algerian War. According to Fanon, the revolution had become part of Algerian identity. The ideal of the Algerian nation had been so firmly implanted in the Algerians’ minds that Algeria, as an ideal, had become an essential aspect of Algerian identity. Fanon wrote: “The Algerian nation is no longer in a future heaven.” Focusing on psychological transformations of the Algerian people by nationalism, he continued, Algeria “is no longer the product of hazy and fantasy-ridden imaginations. It is at the very center of the Algerian man. There is a new kind of Algerian man, a new dimension to his existence” (30).
Fanon argued that revolutionary action created a new man. Fanon did not dwell on the lasting effects of violence on Algeria, nor did he attempt to account for the structural embeddedness (unless dealing with capitalism) of traditional Algerian culture in his new man. For Fanon, the genius of revolutionary action rested on its ability to fundamentally and swiftly erase ingrained psychological dimensions of oppression on Algerian identity, which had suffered generations of colonial usurpation. The revolution’s power resided “henceforth in the radical mutation that the Algerian has undergone” (32). In other words, the power of the revolution would rise or fall as transformations in Algerians’ identities occurred.
In concluding The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon made it clear that Algeria and other colonized nations did not want reconciliation with Europe. “Come, then, comrades,” he wrote, “the European game has finally ended; we must find something different” (312). Since the United States had tried and failed to create something better from European ideas, the new man did not want to create a “third Europe” (313). Turning his back on Europe, Fanon urged his “comrades” to do the same in order to achieve the ideal of humanity, which Europe had prophesied but failed to deliver. Fanon confessed that he would be asking his comrades to invent a new identity and enter unexplored territories of man. This search was itself an act of courage: “For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man” (316).
Since Fanon’s Manichaeanism and conceptual rejection of European ideas was such an integral part of his mythical new man, it is important to ask why French intellectuals such as Sartre were so taken with his work. Politically, the French avant-garde left (to which Sartre belonged) had curious reasons for aligning itself with the FLN, and the Fanon-Sartre union symbolizes the ultimate unhealthy marriage, a marriage of convenience as it were, between the French left and the FLN. France could, Sartre claimed in the preface, benefit from reading Fanon’s provocative text. But Sartre acknowledged in interviews that the French left could also profit from the French-Algerian War.
As mentioned above, Sartre spelled out in the Critique his belief that there was a universal proletarian revolution afoot and that the Algerian revolution was part of it. Hence any cooperation between the French and Algerians would have to be revolutionary in nature. For example, when Sartre spoke of the French youth in an interview in 1960, he claimed that student movements had been important in maintaining contacts between Muslim and French students.44 In addition, he pointed out that workers’ unions played the most crucial roles in maintaining contact between the two communities. In order for the revolution—in France and Algeria—to advance (during and after the war) “it was necessary to create a liaison and a solidarity between the French workers and Algerians” (2). When asked if this did not have an unpatriotic quality to it, Sartre replied that, after the decline of the notion of internationalism following World War I, it was necessary for the French left to appeal to the “underdeveloped world” to revive internationalism:
In the face of the awakening of the underdeveloped world, the left should on the contrary restore internationalism. It is a primordial question. The French left should be in solidarity with the FLN. Their types are after all connected. The victory of the FLN would be the victory of the left. I have always been a partisan of the independence of Algeria, and it is, according to me, the only internationalist position possible for the left because it is precisely a matter of relations with a certain nationalism of the colonized countries which is rising. (2)
It is important to understand exactly how Sartre intended to use the Algerian revolution as a life support for the French left and a means for the left to resuscitate its imperiled legitimacy. In an interview given to La Voiecommuniste in February 1961, he pushed the theme further by asking why so many “petit bourgeois intellectuals” were repelled by “the idea of direct negotiation with the FLN.”45 The answer was simple: because the FLN represented a “real revolution, not only nationalist but also social.” The violence implied in this “real revolution” should have been understood as “just violence, an anticolonial violence of a disfavored class that many are afraid to deal with in the revolution. They want Algeria for the Algerians as long as it belongs to the bourgeois Algerians.”
As long as it was the so-called Third World proletariat that took power, Sartre was for an Algerian Algeria. This, of course, had special significance for the notion of political reconciliation, especially as it applied to the question of assimilation. No one, he claimed, “except a few Muslims at a time when they were not ready to take a role in the revolution,” really believed in assimilation. Since assimilation was as undesirable as it was impossible, it was necessary to encourage solidarity between the French workers and the Algerian super-exploited. This was such a pressing issue, he argued, that there were but two immediate and real objectives to meet today: demystification of de Gaulle’s referendum and “the fundamental campaign of solidarity, in actions, between the Algerian Revolution and the French workers.” This notion of solidarity, Sartre claimed, had motivated intellectuals to draw up the Manifesto of the 121. As he said, “one of the reasons motivating me to sign [the Manifesto] was precisely that we need today a whole series of radical stands, which, whether they’re followed or not, make people express their solidarity.”
For intellectuals who opposed Fanon’s depiction and Sartre’s exaltation of violence, the idea of creating solidarity through violence was a flagrant and scandalous political game. Jean Daniel, as a Jewish pied noir who had taken a moderate position concerning negotiations between the FLN and the French state, disputed Sartre’s and Fanon’s calls for revolutionary violence. Daniel claimed that this really translated into the idea of revenge, which would not help get to the next crucial step of political negotiations. Daniel noted in L’Express: “The colonized’s knowledge of his power to avenge suffices to resuscitate his dignity.”46 If any real progress was to be made, it would have to be at the negotiation tables and not through violence. In addition, Daniel attacked Sartre and the French left for appropriating the Algerian revolution for their own self-rejuvenation. By appropriating Algerians in this dubious manner, he argued, the radical left compromised the more important issue of world peace in order to spin illusory and harmful notions of Third World revolution.
In his journal La Blessure, on December 8, 1961, Daniel went still further and wrote that after hearing of Fanon’s death he felt that The Wretched of the Earth was obviously the work of a man “condemned” to death who cared little about the effects of his theories on the living.47 “So Fanon was able to work sufficiently in order to leave something that is not himself, which was already not he, a useful presence for others which is not his own.” This was not to say that Daniel did not respect Fanon; in fact, he admitted that he did. Unfortunately, Daniel lamented, Fanon would become a “saint” in Algeria because Fanon had “bothered everyone, because he [had] upset everyone, myself included as I write these lines” (66).
If Daniel thought Fanon’s text was bothersome, he found Sartre’s preface even more disturbing. Daniel commented that Sartre’s justifications for anticolonial violence—which affirmed Algerian identity by killing Europeans—was the worst form of “verbal masturbation!” (67). Sartre’s endorsement of Fanon’s call to violence was frivolous because one could not justify one’s existence by killing other men: “If I kill, if I could, I would be denied; I would deny all men. This would include the rebel Aimé Césaire who presents himself thus: ‘My name: offended; my first name: humiliated; my state: revolted; my age: Stone Age’ ” (67).
What was for Daniel perhaps most discouraging about the Fanon-Sartre duo was that neither Fanon nor Sartre truly understood what types of fruits their absurd theories would bear. In fact, neither could fathom the damage their writings could have on the Third World. If nationalists tried to implement the ideas sketched in The Wretched of the Earth, it could force the Third World into “convulsions.” The result could be uncontrollable murdering because “after having found it necessary to kill the colonist, they will find it indispensable to kill those among them who refused to kill. The redemptive assassin will be worse than the crimes of Stalin.” The simple fact, according to Daniel, was that Fanon had penned a “terrible book, terribly revealing, and terribly foretelling of barbaric justice.” Both Fanon and Sartre had simply supplied unscrupulous terrorists with an identity politics that allowed a new identity to be forged through the act of killing others.48
Sartre could anoint this delusional vision of violence with the benedictory pen of a righteous French intellectual only because he lived in abstractions. “For Sartre,” Daniel noted in his journal on January 3, 1962, “the Arab is abstract. He sees in him [the Arab] only the oppressed, the humiliated, the alienated but almost nothing ‘positive’, like a Jew who has been saved from the look of ‘anti-Semitism’ ” (86).49 The problem with this, Daniel continued, was that Sartre knew exclusively the men of the FLN, the “revolutionaries” who looked like the “French Marxists.” This meant that Sartre was profoundly ignorant of Algeria and the “Arab problem” in general. In part, the reason for this miscomprehension was that Sartre’s own view of the Algerians came from Frantz Fanon, who was neither Algerian, nor North African, nor French. Fanon was, in short, equally ignorant of “Arabism, Islam, and even the Mediterranean,” and his influence on Sartre had been completely negative. It was truly a case of the blind leading the blind, who—though seeming to follow the blessed path to revolutionary salvation—were, in fact, leading the faithful to a grotesque spectacle of cannibalistic fratricide. Together both Sartre and Fanon had neglected the “Arab-Islamic determinations” of the Algerian conflict out of their “passion” to make Algeria fit their “revolutionary and abstract universal” (86). In other words, while Sartre and Fanon certainly believed that they were correct in diagnosing the ills of colonial identity, not all or even most French and Algerian intellectuals agreed.
Pierre Bourdieu
One of the most important theorists who unequivocally rejected Fanon’s and Sartre’s analysis of colonial identity and anticolonial violence was Pierre Bourdieu. In 1961 Bourdieu—the young French sociologist then at the University of Algiers—once again entered the conversation among intellectuals regarding the source of the Algerian conflict’s violence in an essay entitled “Revolution within the Revolution,” published in the January edition of Esprit.50 Along with a preface by Raymond Aron, this essay was added to the English edition of The Algerians. Aron noted in the book’s preface that objectivity was especially necessary because it was now time to admit that the French-Algerian War had been a major strain on France: “For almost eight years the drama of Algeria weighed on the French like an obsession, a guilt, and also like a duty. It precipitated the fall of a regime, split a nation asunder. It imperiled domestic peace and spread throughout the mother country a climate of passion and crime. It could no longer be considered a simple episode in a historically irresistible movement called ‘decolonization.’ ”51 Rather, the war had become a “tragic moment in the history of France.” It was therefore up to those who cared about the “destiny of France” to look to Bourdieu’s work in order to find in it the “data necessary for reflection and judgment.” Not surprisingly—after his own turn against reconciliation in 1957—Aron argued that the most critical observation Bourdieu’s readers must be prepared to accept was that the differences between the French colons’ “culture” and the culture of the various groups of Algerians expressed “a radical incompatibility” (vi). Hence, for Aron, Bourdieu’s work would show decisively that reconciliation was impossible.
Unquestionably, violence was responsible for forcing the collapse of reconciliation, but this collapse was not due to the violence of Algerian nationalists; rather, violence in Algeria was a “logical” part and “completely integrated within the colonial system.”52 Furthermore, Bourdieu wrote that the Algerian revolution was not a product of a few radical nationalists who tyrannized the Algerian masses with violence, so to suggest that the revolution was a result of a “handful of ringleaders” was gross negligence (145). Sociologically the revolt had broad-based support, responding to systematic colonial violence. According to Bourdieu, this meant that the French-Algerian War could not be read as the “mere explosion of aggressiveness and hatred” (149). More to the point, he insisted that even violence expressed in “individual conflicts” was the product of an “objective situation” sociologically constituted in the colonial structure.
Since even individual violence could be interpreted as originating from the objective situation, where did this leave Franco-Algerian relations? And what did violence mean in the context of the identity question? According to Bourdieu, in contrast to Fanon, the Algerians were able to make distinctions between “the true Frenchman” (the “Frenchmen of France”) and “the French of Algeria” (151–52).53 Initially, Algerians had made ontological distinctions among the different types of Frenchmen on the basis of ideal types—the Frenchmen of France believed in and acted on just principles. However, Algerian terrorism and French repression had destroyed any remaining solidarity between French and Algerians. As a result, the war that had been ushered in by objective structures (colonialism) was being transformed by the products of objective situations (revolution).
Like Fanon, Bourdieu recognized that at the heart of the situational and structural transformations of Algerian society, the war produced psychological transformations, which had a profound impact on the identity question. Now, for the first time, the Algerian people had “a voice, a voice capable of saying ‘No!’ ” to colonial relations (157). This being the case, Bourdieu insisted that it was crucial to elucidate this effect on contemporary Algerian culture. Here his analysis also closely paralleled that of Jacques Berque. Bourdieu claimed that one visible effect of the war was erosion of “traditional traditionalism.” Traditional traditionalism had originated as an Algerian response to European hegemony and was part of an Algerian identity that had internally rejected colonialism. Colonialism could not fully dominate Algerian identity, and the voice that said “No!” to it came from social actors who could simultaneously borrow and reject aspects of “Western civilization” without “denying [themselves] in the process.” The collective appropriations and rejections of Western culture acted as a catalyst for the Algerians’ new self-identification and allowed them to experience the feeling of autonomy (163).
Although Bourdieu’s structural model of the war emphasized the psychological dimensions of the conflict, he did not want to overstate the importance of subjective transformations within Algerian society.”54 What was perhaps most essential to realize was the extent to which the underlying traditionalism of Algerian society (based on sacred communal values, respect for elders, and the patrilineal system) had been structurally transformed by the war’s own internal negative logic. The negative influence destabilized Algerian society and created a gulf, not only between Algerians and the West but also between older and younger generations: “The revolutionary values are those of the younger generation. Schooled by the war, turned towards the future, and completely ignorant of a past to which their elders cannot help remaining attached, the adolescents are often animated (and the part they played in the revolutionary war bears witness to this) by a spirit of radicalism and negativism which often separates them from their elders” (186).
Sociologically, Bourdieu continued, Algeria’s youth culture was now part of the society that was to be transformed by the revolution. For example, the new status of women represented one of the most telling breaks within Algerian traditionalism. Given “greater independence” by her new role as a partner in revolution, the Algerian woman was freer to circulate in the urban areas and, importantly, was entrusted with business and administrative affairs. Yet Bourdieu warned that the changing view of women was part of a larger social upheaval and should not be misunderstood. In reality, the changing status of women, the growing distance between the generations, and the rejection of Western values were all the results of the decolonization process. These changes fundamentally altered the social structures and the minds of the Algerian people but had yet to be worked out fully for Algerian society (187).
Bourdieu predicted that Algerian identity and society would be fundamentally different after the war. However, very much in opposition to Fanon, he insisted that Algeria’s leaders could not be naive about the fact that the “whirlwind of violence” had attacked every “vestige of the past” (188). Postcolonial Algeria would be highly revolutionary “because it [had] been highly revolutionized.” Because Algerian society would be completely chaotic and the situation so explosive, Bourdieu concluded that it was likely that the newborn nation would have to choose between “chaos” and “an original form of socialism” capable of responding to the unprecedented needs of a postcolonial situation (192).
Where Bourdieu differed most from Fanon was on the relationship between theory and practice. As a practicing academic sociologist, Bourdieu believed that it was one thing to analyze an objective situation and quite another to engage in revolutionary speculation, masquerading it as a sociological analysis as Fanon constantly claimed he was doing. Not surprisingly, Bourdieu (as a social scientist, not as a revolutionary) offered a cautious and objective evaluation of the revolution and, as he would say later, thought Fanon’s analysis of Algerian identity and the revolution was dangerous and naive because it remained “speculative” and celebratory in nature.”55 According to Fanon, postcolonial Algeria would free Algerians, both men and women, from an oppressive traditionalism, even an Islamic traditionalism. Fanon (as an atheist) had no place for Islam in his speculative postcolonial society. According to Bourdieu, Fanon’s and Sartre’s incomprehension of the Algerian revolution went beyond the mere misunderstanding of the Islamic dimensions of Algerian society. In a 1994 interview with me Bourdieu put it this way: Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Sartre’s preface to it not only were inaccurate about Algeria, they were hazardous because they used “Parisian” ideas to explain Algeria. Sartre’s preface, Bourdieu said, is a “completely irresponsible text.”56“Sartre says no matter what,” without any regard for the truth. Likewise, what
Fanon says corresponds to nothing. It is even dangerous to make the Algerians believe the things he says. This would bring them to a utopia. And I think these men contributed to what Algeria became because they told stories to Algerians who often did not know their own country any more than the French who spoke about it, and, therefore, the Algerians retained a completely unrealistic utopian illusion of Algeria….
[T] he texts of Fanon and Sartre are frightening for their irresponsibility. You would have to be a megalomaniac to think you could say just any such nonsense. It is true, of course, that I do not have a lot of admiration for these two here… even when they are right, it is for bad reasons.
In fairness, Bourdieu did admit that it was very good that both Sartre and Fanon were “against the war,” and he agreed with them on this issue. He noted that it was also “very good” that Sartre took the position he did with regard to the “121”; in fact, it was “extraordinary.” But the text that accompanied Sartre’s position “was propaganda. It was the symbol of intellectual irresponsibility. It was a la mode.” Furthermore, on the level of analysis, both Fanon and Sartre used Manichaean categories of identity that were fundamentally absurd in Algeria given its Islamic history and the dispersed agrarian character of Algerian society. Bourdieu stated, “Sartre did this with regard to Algeria.” Moreover, he continued,
The problems of racism [against blacks and against Algerian Muslims] do not present themselves in the same terms. There is a specificity to the racism against blacks, which is very particular. There are corporeal properties…. This is absolute racism. In the Algerian case … the problems of corporeal identity that Fanon articulated with regard to blacks are not manifested at all in the same fashion. I have never heard an Algerian present his problems in the same terms as blacks. There is certainly the inferior treatment, and so on, but not on the basis of corporeal identity, on the basis that Fanon writes about. I think this is very important…. The black’s problems are not the same as the Algerian’s problems. For the Algerians, there are poverty, humiliation, the Frenchification, and linguistic issues, but they are not concentrated to the degree to which Fanon claims on corporeality. There is a huge difference…. The Algerian women have a relationship with their body that is not the same. I think that the logic that Fanon develops does not have the same importance for the North Africans [Maghrébins] as it does for Fanon.
Bourdieu’s comments on Fanon and Sartre are more than a mere difference of opinion. According to Bourdieu’s later, postindependence interpretation, what made Fanon so important in the formation of an independent Algerian state under Colonel Boumediene was the negative effect Fanon’s miscomprehension of the revolution had on postcolonial Algerian society. Because Fanon placed an emphasis on the revolutionary and not the traditional residues of Algerian society, his analysis was anti-Algerian, or nonspecific, meaning that Fanon’s writings universalized and depersonalized the Algerian revolution by making it stand for something that it was not. Fanon’s imposition of non–North African and corporeal categories of identity on Algerian Muslims only complicated matters. Furthermore, Fanon’s suspicion of colonialism translated into a general suspicion (if not contempt) of traditional Algerian society because it had been so deeply contaminated by colonialism. In this context, traditionalism posed a tremendous obstacle to so-called true revolutionary activity.
There was perhaps an even greater danger in Fanon’s analysis. Not only had Fanon misunderstood the importance of Islam in Algerian society and undervalued the importance of the nuanced and hybrid notions of colonial identity, he promoted the fatal and critical belief that the Algerian “peasantry” represented a “revolutionary class.”57 It was true, and Bourdieu had written it himself, that the Algerian revolution had broad-based support from the peasants. However, the peasants in Algeria were far from constituting a revolutionary class. Here Bourdieu also conceded that Fanon was not alone in his misunderstanding of peasant society. Most of the “Western scholars,” Bourdieu noted, “were pulled” by Mao Tse-tung’s ideas about the peasantry in China and were convinced that the Chinese model could be grafted onto other emerging nations. “It was the Chinese myth that was forced on the Algerian reality.”
According to Bourdieu, reality in Algeria during the revolution was clearly incompatible with Fanon’s writings. Bourdieu realized early on that Algerian leaders were all too eager to try to apply Fanon’s notions of the avant-garde revolutionary peasantry. In response to these developments, he immediately published Travail et travailleurs en Algérie (1963) and Le Déracinement: La crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie (1964, with Abdelmalek Sayad), in order to help Algerians make the best choices. In truth, Bourdieu stated, the “Algerian peasantry” was “overwhelmed by the war, by the concentration camps, and by the mass deportations. To claim that it was a revolutionary peasantry was completely idiotic.” “Sartre and Fanon never understood this.” Even worse, Fanon’s and Sartre’s theories were “maddening” because they had “consequences.” “Unfortunately, very important Algerian leaders… lived in this utopian delirium, which claimed that everything would be changed by the revolution.” The irony of this utopia, Bourdieu said, is particularly sad for contemporary Algeria. Algerian leaders were so eager to reconstitute Algerian society and Algerian identity that they uncritically accepted this “pretentious foolishness.” The end result was that Sartre’s and Fanon’s visions of revolutionary identity and Algerian society epistemologically recolonized Algeria’s political leadership after the war. The lingering results are, according to Bourdieu, transparent in many of Algeria’s social and political conflicts today. In effect, these conflicts have been influenced by a political Manichaeism and a failed revolutionary utopian socialism. In other words, authenticity, violence, difference, and a lack of hospitality for the Other suggest that Fanon’s myth of the new man was strong enough to persuade leaders to follow but naive enough to lead them into one of the most regrettable political cul-de-sacs of the twentieth century.58
In conclusion, the questions of sameness or difference were thus important aspects of the identity debates during the French-Algerian War. As we have seen, many intellectuals found the concept of the Other particularly attractive for describing the complexities of the identity question. However, as has been described throughout this work, intellectuals had a wide variety of motives for choosing words and concepts to explain their own feelings on issues that they believed directly impacted their own national community’s future. The concept of the Other was in this sense no exception, for it was deeply implicated in the debates over reconciliation and France’s future in Algeria. For each of the various intellectuals who used the concept, it was an epistemological means to address the identity question and express their ideological commitments and values.
Similarly, attempts to condemn or condone political violence in Algeria on the basis of the question of identity were extremely contentious and prone to bring out a whole host of political concerns. For the proponents of nonviolence, the Other could be an effective analytical tool. As such, it could be used to help people understand the depths of torment Algerians suffered as a result of colonialism, not as a means to justify tormenting and killing the French colonists. Yet for those who supported anticolonial violence, identity was already in and of itself deeply impregnated by politics. The primary concern of which was to exorcize—through violence—the colonial system from the psyche of the colonized. The Other was in this sense a different and far more lethal kind of tool.
However, as we have seen, the vast majority of intellectuals were committed to understanding how the issues of Otherness and identity related to the process of decolonization. By and large, although these writers repu- diated the colonial system, they did not believe that unmitigated violence was Algeria’s key to a better postcolonial world. Unfortunately, in these disputes, Othering was often used as a justification for extreme violence. Some, though not all, intellectuals fell prey to the desire to use the Algerian revolution and difference for their own revolutionary agenda.59 Lamentably this is also one of the lasting legacies of the French-Algerian War, and it remains in Algeria to this day. Using sophisticated theories of difference (ethnic, religious, and linguistic) to justify violence became (and still is today) the hallmark of an ongoing, uncivil war.