Colonial Trauma

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Karima Lazali. Colonial Trauma

Table of Contents

Guide

Pages

Series Title. Critical South

Colonial Trauma. A Study of the Psychic and Political Consequences of Colonial Oppression in Algeria

Copyright Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Foreword Mariana Wikinski

References

Notes

Introduction: The Difficulty of Acknowledging Colonial Trauma

The history of French colonization in Algeria: a blank space in memory and politics

A much-needed interdisciplinary approach

Note

1 Psychoanalysis and Algerian Paradoxes

Disarray of the private and public spheres

God’s reinforcement of failing institutions

The power of religion and the religion of power

The literary text and the invisible staging of power

The power of the “language, religion, and politics” (LRP) bloc as revealed by clinical psychoanalysis

The duplicity of subjects confronting censorship from the LRP

Abandoned citizenship and speech acts

Notes

2 Colonial Rupture

The colony: the rogue child of the Enlightenment

Colonialism’s destruction of social cohesion

A colonial republic divided, or the “duty to civilize [the] barbarians”

1945: a literature of refusal is born

Nedjma: an esthetic of colonial destruction?

Disrupting genealogical ties: the effect of “renaming” Algerians in the 1880s

Subjective catastrophes and the disappearance of the father as symbolic reference

Writing against anonymous filiation

Jean El Mouhoub Amrouche: a broken voice

Notes

3 Colonialism Consumed by War

1945–1954: the necessity of war

The impossibility of forgetting and madness, a “remedy” for disappearance

Silencing the unforgettable mutilation of bodies

Toulouse, 2012: the return of murder

Constructing the “nation”

The writer’s pressing need: transform disappearance into absence

Notes

4 Colonialism’s Devastating Effects on Post-Independence Algeria

The mutilated body of the colonized and the hunger for reparation

Colonial hogra and a frantic quest for legitimacy

The “orphaning” effect of colonialism and its impact

Further distortion of patronyms

Divested of a name: a form of colonial murder

Manufacturing erasure and denial under colonialism

From colonial trauma to social trauma

Notes

5 Fratricide: The Dark Side of the Political Order

The emergence of Algerian nationalist movements in the 1920s

The War of Liberation and an impossible fraternity

From parricide to fratricide

When the murders between brothers are dismissed …

Calling on the father

A gap in memory sets off an endless deadly battle

Notes

6 The Internal War of the 1990s

Reconsidering the LRP bloc

The tyranny and pleasure of power

The shift of 1988 and the experience of political plurality

An internal war of unprecedented violence

The curse of fratricide

The war comes home

A strange reversal in naming

Do freedom and terror go hand in hand?

Notes

7 State of Terror and State Terror

A clinical understanding of terror

The terrified subject’s self-elimination

Psychological terror is always political

Reconciliation: state terror?

When the state tries to make its practice of disappearance disappear

Notes

8 Legitimacy, Fratricide, and Power

Jugurtha: a fratricidal hero

Unpunished crimes within the Republic

The legitimacy the French conquest claimed for itself

The impassioned scene of coloniality

The specter of discord: el Fitna

Notes

9 Getting Out of the Colonial Pact

After Liberation, the indefatigable re-enactment of coloniality within subjectivities and the political order

Trauma as shelter and alibi

The brutalization of the living: the disappearance of children

The “bone seekers”: from children to fathers

Notes

Conclusion: Ending the Colonial Curse: Lessons from Fanon

The “colonial pact”: erasure of memory, disappearance of bodies, dispossession of existence

The mystical quality of the colonized

For a future liberation

Notes

Index

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The publication of this series is supported by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Series editors: Natalia Brizuela and Leticia Sabsay

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It was Piera Aulagnier (1984) who described the state of alienation as the destination and destiny of the ego’s thinking function, of the ego as it seeks to eliminate all conflict and psychic suffering, including conflict between the ego and its ideals and between the ego and its desires. A step short of psychic death, the state of alienation presupposes that the subject has decathected from thought inasmuch as thought is experienced as a risk. The narcissistic contract, the apparatus of the LRP, the state of alienation, and the state of terror might thus converge in establishing the categories of persecutor and persecuted as ways of organizing intra-psychic life and the social bond; they might converge in making suspicion decisive for the subject’s relation to alterity, sustaining an effort to banish from the psyche all forms of conflict that might lead the subject to a confrontation with itself or to a confrontation with the world in which it lives. The forbidden governs both the subject’s knowledge of external reality and its knowledge of psychic reality, Aulagnier suggests.

In these pages, I have tried to locate the specificity of the colonial trauma that Lazali analyzes with such clarity and sensitivity, a trauma that inescapably affects subjectivity, the social bond, and the practice of psychoanalysis in Algeria. And yet for all the specificity of Lazali’s framework, throughout my reading of her extraordinary book I saw how close our experiences are to one another, as if we lived in the same social space and spoke the same language. If in all colonization we see an apparatus for suppression and the domination of difference at work, in this text, by contrast, we find an ethics of hospitality, an openness to the foreign and the other that gives us the sense of being sheltered and of offering shelter to an experience of contact with alterity. If this were to leave a lasting trace in our thought, it would undoubtedly work against the repetition of such a devastating history.

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