Ecstatic Communities: Sufism, Modernism, and Political Possibility in Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Talismano

Abstract

Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Talismano (1979 [1987]) depicts a carnivalesque political revolt in postcolonial Tunis. In light of the novel’s explicit intertextual gestures to Georges Bataille, I argue that Bataille’s theory of community sheds light on both the meaning and import of this revolt. Community, for Bataille, refers to an experience of unselving; this theory emerges in part out of Bataille’s readings of Christian mystics such as St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross. In the same way, the revolutionary community that Meddeb depicts in Talismano is predicated upon an experience of mystical annihilation inherent to Sufism. Yet where Bataille deploys his ideas about community in opposition to European political ideologies of the 1930s and 40s, the revolutionary community of Talismano is positioned against the dominant contemporary ideologies of the Arab world – namely, arabité, fundamentalist Islam, and militant secularism. I argue that Talismano resurrects and rethinks Bataille’s political ethos for the postcolonial Maghreb, while situating Bataille’s modernist ideas in the longue durée of Sufism.