Professional Documents
Culture Documents
http://frc.sagepub.com
Diasporic Subjectivities
Colin Davis
French Cultural Studies 2006; 17; 335
DOI: 10.1177/0957155806068096
The online version of this article can be found at:
http://frc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/17/3/335
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
Additional services and information for French Cultural Studies can be found at:
Email Alerts: http://frc.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts
Subscriptions: http://frc.sagepub.com/subscriptions
Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav
Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
Citations (this article cites 3 articles hosted on the
SAGE Journals Online and HighWire Press platforms):
http://frc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/17/3/335#BIBL
Colin Davis
21/8/06
12:43
Page 1
Diasporic Subjectivities
COLIN DAVIS
Royal Holloway, University of London
If everybody stayed at home (assuming they had a home to stay at), there
would be no need for diaspora studies. But we live in an era of
displacement. In their useful introduction to Theorizing Diaspora, Jana
Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (2003: 4) describe the importance of diasporas
in current intellectual debate:
The term diaspora has been increasingly used by anthropologists,
literary theorists, and cultural critics to describe the mass migrations and
displacements of the twentieth century, particularly in reference to
independence movements in formerly colonized areas, waves of refugees
fleeing war-torn states, and fluxes of economic migration in the postWorld War II era.
Colin Davis
21/8/06
336
12:43
Page 2
Colin Davis
21/8/06
12:43
Page 3
337
Colin Davis
21/8/06
338
12:43
Page 4
Colin Davis
21/8/06
12:43
Page 5
339
Colin Davis
21/8/06
340
12:43
Page 6
100). Derrida both describes something specific to his own experience and
generalises that experience to give it broader validity. As Jane Hiddleston
argues (2005: 299300), for Derrida:
[a]lienation and lack are not symptoms of a lost wholeness, but are
constitutive of all language and culture . . . From this perspective,
language is perceived always to contain otherness or marginality, and
myths of belonging and unmediated identification are revealed as
unworkable. The colonised Jews of Algeria were dispossessed of their
language in a traumatic and shocking manner, but alienation in language
at the same time affects coloniser and colonised alike.
Derrida relates this alienation from his language to a lack, but it is a lack
which is not a lack of something that was ever, or could ever, be present.
From the specific experience of diaspora emerges a general account of
subjectivity which could have come straight out of Sartres LEtre et le nant:
Comme le manque, cette alination demeure parat constitutive. Mais
elle nest ni un manque ni une alination, elle ne manque de rien qui la
prcde ou la suive, elle naline aucune ipsit, aucune proprit, aucun soi
qui ait jamais pu reprsenter sa veille (Derrida, 1996: 47). The link here
between (the loss of) language and diasporic subjectivity is important. In a
key metaphor, Derrida (Derrida, 1996: 91) relates the possession of language
to the protection of a chez-soi. Having a language is also having a home, but
language cannot be possessed. Derridas triple loss of language makes more
acute what he regards as a constitutive alienation, shared by both colonisers
and colonised (though the former may delude themselves that it is not true).
And lacking a chez-soi in language is also to be deprived of a soi, as Derrida
suggests (1996: 108) in a resonant list which links place, home and
subjectivity: la place, le lieu, le logis du chez-soi, lipse, ltre chez-soi ou
ltre-avec-soi du soi (Derrida, 1996: 108). To lack language is also to lack a
place, a home, a being-at-home and a being.
There are, then, compelling links here between diaspora, the dissemination
of meaning, the dispossession of language, the loss of statehood and the lackwhich-is-not-a-lack within the subject. The alination originaire (Derrida,
1996: 121) described by Derrida ensures that language always belongs to the
other; it can never be the property of any speaking subject. The event of
speech, the phenomenon by which the subjects intended meaning (vouloirdire) is supported by its ability to hear and to understand itself in the
intimacy of its subjectivity (sentendre-parler), is instituted and disturbed by
this originary alienation. Derrida argues that the phenomenon is also a
phantasm, and, as he goes on to suggest (Derrida, 1996: 48), Phantasma,
cest aussi le fantme, le double ou le revenant. The most intimate part of
the subject is already haunted by non-present presences which eerily disturb
its self-possession. This flourish is evidently linked to Derridas work on
spectrality and in particular to what has proved to be one of the most
Colin Davis
21/8/06
12:43
Page 7
341
Colin Davis
21/8/06
12:43
Page 8
342
outside the subject, making them more real and in the process re-affirming
the distinctions that haunted subjectivity no longer knows for certain: real
and imaginary, self and other, subject and object, life and death. Typically,
the ghost returns to put things right, to restore an order that had been
temporarily disrupted. In this respect, modern stories of the supernatural
perform the normative, restorative function described by Keith Thomas in
his now-classic Religion and the Decline of Magic. Thomas describes
(Thomas, 1971: 597) how the ghosts of pre-Reformation Europe returned to
confess some unrequited offence, to describe the punishment which lay in
wait for some heinous sin, or to testify to the rewards in store for virtuous
conduct, or to denounce an undetected evil-doer. Even if we no longer
have the belief systems which explain such functions, the roles of the ghosts
in, for example, Ghost or The Sixth Sense are not much different, as they
return in order to complete unfinished business.
However, if the ghosts return to restore order, the world to which they
come back is transformed by the very fact of their return, so that the
anxieties they were meant to still are also reactivated by their presence. This
can be seen graphically in zombie movies. George A. Romeros great zombie
series, comprising Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the
Dead and Land of the Dead, illustrates how the repressed returns as both the
same and different, repeating the past and in the process showing it for what
it was and savagely transforming it. In The Night of the Living Dead the
zombie attack was an apparently isolated incident, but the subsequent films
show these attacks becoming more widespread, as the zombies gradually
colonise the land of the living. In Land of the Dead, the most recent of the
series, the zombies have more or less taken over, with only one walled city
remaining as a pocket of human habitation. Here, then, to be alive is to be
encircled by the dead, desperately and hopelessly resisting being recruited
to their ranks. But to read the film in this way makes firmer oppositions
between the living and the dead than it actually supports. The zombies are
precisely not dead, or not dead enough. Like vampires, they are caught
between their first death, which turns them into what they are, and their
second death, which will finally destroy them. In the meantime, they are in
some sense alive. One sequence from Dawn of the Dead shows them
wandering around a shopping mall, looking mindlessly in the store windows
much as their living counterparts might. And perhaps they are even more
alive than the living: they are now pure hunger, pure desire, no longer
bound by the paltry courtesies of living social beings. Moreover they are, as
Zizek memorably puts it (Zizek, 1992: 223),
v
Colin Davis
21/8/06
12:43
Page 9
343
As Zizek says of vampires, precisely as living dead, they are far more alive
than us; and, he goes on, the real living dead are we, common mortals,
condemned to vegetate in the symbolic (Zizek, 1991: 221). The zombie movie
disturbs the discrete worlds of the living and the dead. In the process it enacts
the constitutive ambiguity of diaspora in that it seems to depend upon a settled
opposition (here: between the living and the dead), but it then mercilessly and
ruthlessly devours that opposition, just as the zombies devour their prey.
And out of the zombie movie emerges, in dramatic form, the question posed,
according to Lacan, by the obsessional neurotic: Am I dead or alive?
What is at stake, and what is dispersed, in diasporic subjectivities is, then,
the subjects assurance of its place within a settled order which would secure
its sense of belonging and even its existence. If tales of ghosts and zombies
illustrate the epistemological anxieties which come with this sense of
disturbance, some of the ethical and political quandaries faced by the diasporic
subject can be seen in Camuss short story LHte from LExil et le royaume.5
The story tells of a school teacher, Daru, who is ordered to take an Arab
accused of murdering a relative to prison; after a night spent together in the
school house, Daru takes the Arab part of the way but then releases him,
only to see him walking of his own accord towards the town where the
prison is located; returning to his school, Daru finds a threatening message
on his blackboard: Tu as livr notre frre. Tu paieras (Camus, 1957: 101).
The title of the collection LExil et le royaume, in which the story appears,
already raises the questions of belonging and alienation developed in
LHte. Daru is in Algeria as part of Frances colonial mission, so he has in a
sense taken ownership of a land where he does not belong. Yet the landscape
described in the opening pages of the story repels all its human inhabitants,
so that it belongs to no one any more than it belongs to Daru. Impoverished
and famished, the local people are described as cette arme de fantmes
haillonneux errant dans le soleil (Camus, 1957: 85). They are barely alive,
transformed into ghosts in their own land, exiled even when they are at
home, caught between life and death. As part of a kind of European diaspora
in Algeria, Daru does not belong here, but neither does he belong anywhere
else: Le pays tait ainsi, cruel vivre, mme sans les hommes, qui, pourtant,
narrangeaient rien. Mais Daru y tait n. Partout ailleurs, il se sentait exil
(Camus, 1957: 85). The land is not his, but neither is it anyone elses; he is
not at home there, yet he was born there and he feels out of place everywhere
else. This diasporic condition confuses the normally polarised positions of
coloniser and colonised. The coloniser is away from home but dominant; the
colonised is at home but subordinate. The diasporic subject, on the other
hand, is neither at home nor away from home (or is both), and it is neither
persuasively dominant nor genuinely subordinate.
v
Colin Davis
21/8/06
12:43
Page 10
344
Colin Davis
21/8/06
12:43
Page 11
345
The masculinist perspective here may be regrettable and limiting: the text
refers only to male experiences of fraternity, as soldiers or prisoners. The
passage nevertheless gestures towards a generous availability to the cultural
and racial Other. In accordance with the exiles nostalgia for a lost
homeland, this is conceived as a return to une vieille communaut. Such a
return can be read, though, as the invention of something new as much as
the longing for something old: a vulnerable fraternity found in the subjects
most unguarded moment. The distress and pessimism of LHte are voiced
in its closing lines when this version of fraternity is superseded by its
conflictual counterpart. The message left on Darus blackboard (Tu as livr
notre frre. Tu paieras) reinstates a model of fraternity which brings
brothers together in hostility to their common enemies. The groupings and
entrenched oppositions which the story so carefully breaks down are reestablished at the final moment with a threat of impending violence. The
final sentence of the story describes the diasporic subject as alienated and
alone, albeit in the only place it can be at home and in communion with
others: Dans ce vaste pays quil avait tant aim, il tait seul (Camus, 1957:
101).
LHte is a study in the encounter with otherness both outside and
within the subject. The ethical agenda of the story is set through the
ambiguities which it stages. The problem of the title is emblematic here.
Lhte is both the host and the guest; the word also suggests its nearhomophone lautre, the etymologically related lotage, and the Latin hostis
(enemy), which is also sometimes (wrongly) associated with it on etymological
grounds. Through these resonances, the story poses the questions: Who,
here, is the host and who the guest, who is the self and who the other, who
the enemy and who the friend, who the prisoner and who the captive? In the
story itself, the word lhte is used only once, to refer to the Arab; but the
sentence in which it occurs insists on the absolute equivalence and
interchangeability of self and guestotherhostage: Dans ce dsert, personne,
ni lui [Daru] ni son hte ntaient rien. Et pourtant, hors de ce dsert, ni lun
ni lautre, Daru le savait, nauraient pu vivre vraiment (Camus, 1957: 93). As
a white man in an Arab country, Daru is as much a guest as he is the Arabs
host; and he is a hostage as much as the Arab is a prisoner; each is Other to
the other, and each encounters otherness within his own being. The land
belongs to neither and both; it is a home to neither and both; both are
intruders and each is in trust to the other.
Colin Davis
21/8/06
346
12:43
Page 12
Colin Davis
21/8/06
12:43
Page 13
347
3. In this paragraph I follow the convention of giving diaspora an initial capital when it refers
specifically to the Jewish Diaspora, and using lower case when it refers to the more general
sense of the term.
4. For a now classic exploration of dissemination in the context of postcolonial theory, see
Bhabha, DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation, in The
Location of Culture (Bhabha, 1994).
5. The following discussion of LHte draws on and develops material from Davis, The Cost
of Being Ethical: Fiction, Violence, and Altericide (Davis, 2003). As in that article I am
indebted to the work of Jill Beer (2002).
References
Beer, J. (2002) Le Regard: Face to Face in Albert Camuss LHte, French Studies, 56(2):
17992.
Bhabha, H. K. (1994) The Location of Culture. Routledge: London.
Braziel, J. E. and Mannur, A. (2003) Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points of Contention in
Diaspora Studies, in J. E. Braziel and A. Mannur (eds), Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader,
pp. 122. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Camus, A. (1957) LExil et le royaume. Paris: Gallimard, Folio edition.
Davis, C. (2003) The Cost of Being Ethical: Fiction, Violence, and Altericide, Common
Knowledge, 9(2): 24153.
Davis, C. (2004) After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories and Theory. London and New York:
Routledge.
Derrida, J. (1972) La Dissmination. Paris: Seuil.
Derrida, J. (1996) Le Monolinguisme de lautre. Paris: Galile.
Descartes, R. (1953) uvres et lettres. Paris: Gallimard.
Gilroy, P. (2000) Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race. London: Allen
Lane/Penguin.
Hiddleston, J. (2005) Derrida, Autobiography and Postcoloniality, French Cultural Studies,
16(3): 291304.
Howells, C. (1992) Conclusion: Sartre and the Deconstruction of the Subject, in C. Howells
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, pp. 31852. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
McQuillan, M., MacDonald, G., Purves, R. and Thomson, S. (eds) (1999) Post-Theory: New
Directions in Criticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ricoeur, P. (1990) Soi-mme comme un autre. Paris: Seuil, Points essais edition.
Sartre, J.-P. (1943), LEtre et le nant. Paris: Gallimard, Tel (1980 printing).
Sartre, J.-P. and Lvy, B. (1991) LEspoir maintenant: les entretiens de 1980. Paris: Verdier.
Still, J. (2004) Language as Hospitality: Revisiting Intertextuality via Monolingualism of the
Other, Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory, 27(1): 11327.
Thomas, K. (1971) Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenthand Seventeenth-Century England. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Zizek, S. (1991) For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London
and New York: Verso.
Zizek, S. (1992) Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture.
Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
v
Colin Davis
21/8/06
348
12:43
Page 14