The Ethics of Literature: Representations of Exile in the Works of Abdelkebir Khatibi, Nabile Fares, Helene Cixous, and Jacques Derrida

My dissertation examines the experience of exile in the works of Abdelkebir Khatibi, Nabile Fares, Helene Cixous, and Jacques Derrida. Aside from the intellectual and personal relationships that these four authors share, they also have in common a desire to actualize through the study and creation of art and literature an approach to ethics freed from the constraints of religion, tradition, and Islamic and Western philosophy.;In my first chapter, I explore the experience of "ontological exile" in Khatibi's complex yet little-discussed narrative Le Livre du sang. I combine analyses of the text's metaphors of androgyny, which are drawn from Khatibi's readings of Islamic mysticism and Greek mythology, with a discussion of its historical context in order to reveal the author's critique of the ontological foundations of postcolonial Moroccan nationalism. Like Muthna, the text's antagonist and sometimes protagonist who complicates the classical Sufi notion of the "Beloved," the post-protectorate Moroccan nation is "different and yet the same." Read alongside Khatibi's notion of "pensee-autre" or "other thought," I argue that Le Livre du sang attempts to reorient ontology away from an obsession with "paradisiac nostalgia" and towards the future unknown.;I turn in my second chapter to the experience of "historical exile" as Fares presents it in both his semi-autobiographical novel Un Passager de l'Occident and his graphic novel Les exilees, histoires. Weaving historical discussions of Fares' participation in the Algerian War and independence movements through textual analyses of his critique of "allegorical realism" in Maghrebi literature, I examine how postcolonial politics can stumble, often violently, over competing claims to historical truth. At the center of my reading is the author's critique of Algeria's suppression of its Berber communities in favor of "Arabization" as the unique historical reference for Algerian nationalism. For Fares, the writing of literature has the potential to disrupt the "colonized conscience" of this totalizing historical discourse. Rather than "allegorizing reality," he seeks in his own words to "realize (actualize) allegory"---to make the imagined real.;Cixous' semi-autobiographical narrative of her youth in Algeria, Les reveries de la femme sauvage, becomes the principal focus of my third chapter. Here I relate Cixous' concept of "feminine writing" to the experience of "bodily exile" in colonial and postcolonial Algeria. I explore in detail the rise of scientific racism in pre-war Europe as well as its attendant discourse of bodily integrity. I read Cixous' own accounts of her youth under Vichy alongside Hannah Arendt's critique of Enlightenment humanism in order to reveal how the body---as a political and scientific object in the twentieth century---unraveled the principles of the French Enlightenment, which in turn failed to protect entire swaths of humanity from the presumptions of fascist and racist politics. Cixous' work, I contend, constitutes an attempt through the writing of literature to elevate rather than to denigrate what Arendt calls "the abstract nakedness of being human." I argue that Cixous' feminist theory must be read within the context of her experience in and after Algeria, suggesting that "feminine writing" is also postcolonial writing.;Finally, I synthesize in my last chapter the points made and the questions raised in the previous chapters, shifting my focus to of Derrida's "ethics of hospitality." Derrida's position in Donner la mort abandons the discourses of nationalism, and instead constructs an ethical philosophy upon what he calls "the gift of death." I argue that Derrida seeks in his later writing to culminate his critique of structuralism within an examination of his own experience as a French-Algerian Jew---what might be called a "reconstruction" of ethics that follows his deconstruction of metaphysics. Read alongside his autobiographical Le monolinguisme de l'autre, which ironizes his relationship to this (non-)identity, I argue that Derrida's thinking positions literature as an ethics and a practice, providing to interpretation a performative space in which the multiplicity of meaning can challenge the totalizing discourses of politics, history, and philosophy.;My dissertation represents a defense of the study and writing of literature during a time when both face steep challenges. Be it the temptation towards positivism in the humanities or the promotion of scientific materialism at the expense of the sometimes ineffable qualities of art and literature, I argue that literature has an important role to play in the formation of our responses, in both the postcolonial and global contexts, to ever more rapid changes in world politics and culture.