It’s only a mirage: Tahar Djaout’s critique of logocentrism in L’Invention du désert

Abstract

Set in Algeria, France, and the Arabian Peninsula in the early twelfth and the late twentieth centuries, L’Invention du désert is about an author who reexamines his life and his craft while writing a history of the Almoravid dynasty that ruled Andalusia and a large portion of the Maghreb from 1056 to 1152 CE. Accordingly, the novel is made of two basic narrative strands. The first focuses on the private musings and reminiscences of the narrator, moving forwards and backwards in space and time and going all the way to his childhood. The second narrative strand recounts the life, rise to power, and downfall of Mohamed ibn Toumert, the religious scholar and zealot whose followers brought down the Almoravids and founded the Almohad dynasty that lasted from 1152 to 1269 CE. The two major story-lines that constitute the novel are brought together by the narrator’s reflection on history and archiving for the purpose of problematizing the way Algerian history is conceived and used to address two major social and political concerns confronting Algerians: religious fundamentalism and national identity. The purpose of this article is to examine how Djaout uses the desert both as a topography and a metaphor to challenge the logocentrism of religious fundamentalism and narrow and essentialist definitions of Algerianess. The paper at the same time shows how the understanding and critique of historical logocentrism that are advanced in L’Invention du désert parallel Jacques Derrida’s philosophy put forward in Of Grammatology (Derrida in Of grammatology, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1976) and other early works. Because the manuscripts, critical of Islam as practiced under Almoravid rule, Ibn Toumert carries with him function as archives, the paper also engages with some of the themes Derrida developed later in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Derrida in Archive fever: a Freudian impression, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996).