The "Sensible," the Maternal, and the Ethical Beginnings of Feminist Discourse in Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia and Loin de Medine

Abstract

Assia Djebar's 1985 Algerian novel L'Amour, la fantasia dramatizes the difficulty of finding a place for contemporary feminist Islamic discourse to begin, while her 1991 novel Loin de M�dine confounds both Western reductions of Islam to "fanaticism" and Muslim alternatives of conventionalist or fundamentalist interpretation by depicting the Prophet's authority as indissociable from his ethical subjectivity: revelation emerges from responsiveness to the Other. Articulating by example an ethics concordant with feminism, the Prophet exemplifies a subjectivity inspired in its transcendence of naturalized ideologies and egocentricism, a subjectivity that L'Amour, la fantasia portrays as at once ethically necessary and emancipatory.