Identity, alterity and language in postcolonial context: L'Amour, la Fantasia, Assia Djebar

Abstract

Notions such as Other, difference and plurality are inevitable in contemporary philosophy as a logic that goes hand in hand with society and its functioning, so that the socio-political side of reality henceforth has not a single homogeneous field, but remains heterogeneous and fragmented. This is also the case with the subject and its identity, which is built up progressively in language, in discourse and in its immanent knowledge, so that the identity is revealed as a socio-discursively constructed fiction. In the novel L'Amour, la Fantasia of Assia Djebar published in 1985, this question of transfigured and required identity is omnipresent in the form of a quest for self through a linguistic quest and speleological writing. The writing of this writer becomes a space of interrogation and self-examination, so that her enunciating subject is not an I-am, but an I-become-in-writing. Moreover, the reflection on language in this novel, on the choice of language, has joined the notion of writing, thus forming two facets of the same problematic which is in turn much more complex, namely the question of identity ‒ the search for identity and its reconstitution. The aim of this article is therefore an examination of the notion of identity and its epistemology, while placing our centre of interest in the specific postcolonial context and observing the specific relation between France and Algeria in the socio-political and cultural fields.