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The Language of the Other: Testimonial Exercises

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Abdelkébir Khatibi
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Extract

“Mon Dieu! quel succès!” such was the response of the Moroccan novelist, poet, and sociologist AbdelkéBir Khatibi (1938–2009) when he learned that his 1974 study of the “intersemiotics” of the Islamic body, La blessure du nom propre (“The Wound of the Proper Name”), which dealt, in part, with the monotheistic interdiction against tattoos, had inspired a reader to get a tattoo (Langue 15). While one might be tempted to interpret this remark merely as Khatibi's vindication of the affective powers of his writing, it in fact reveals an important element of his critical-literary practice: his way of bringing deconstruction to bear on the tasks of decolonization. The curious case of the tattooed reader illustrates how, by deconstructing holy writ's apparent desire “to erase in a single palimpsestic gesture all later writing, especially that which is traced on the body” (Blessure 66), Khatibi helped create the conditions for somebody else to perform an act of auto-bio-graphy, understood as a form of mental and corporeal decolonization.

Type
Translations: Life, Language, Alterity
Information
PMLA , Volume 125 , Issue 4: Special Topic Literary Criticism for the Twenty-First Century , October 2010 , pp. 1002 - 1019
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2010

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