In Life and Death in Psychoanalysis Jean Laplanche explores the problematic of a determinist hermeneutic inherent in Freud's concept of the death drive. Does a conception of existence that relates human life to finitude create a sterile closure within the psychoanalytic session? Laplanche's rereading of Freud strives to reconceptualize the project of psychoanalysis away from Freud's emphasis on the death drive, turning instead towards what could be termed an ethical imperative to displace the death drive from within the heart of the vital. Could this imperative offer a project of critique that extends outside Laplanche's rereading of Freud and into a more general theory of the social?
In the pages that follow, I would like to suggest that Laplanche's analysis establishes a distinction between two modes of critical interpretation, the first posing a ‘deathly’ limit on analysis, and a second method which opens the possibility of critique through what I will describe as ‘a vital contamination’. For even as Laplanche calls Freud to task for reading life through the primacy of the death drive, Laplanche's treatment of the question of mourning in Essays on Otherness, and in particular what he describes as a space of ‘non-mourning’, establishes a troubling contradiction in his vitalist approach. How might we put Laplanche to work (as he does Freud) to reread this ‘ghostly’ site of non-mourning? In other words, how can we mine the historical inscription of a negated register of representation? As we will see, an analysis of this problematic in Laplanche generates a focal point for reading the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and cultural critique.
The second section of this paper will thus turn to a literary text by Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment. In Women of Algiers, Djebar crafts a scene of mourning to commemorate a ‘lost culture of women’ in postcolonial Algeria. Her text laments a foreclosure of feminine agency within a nationalist imaginary, and suggests that the political
present is founded upon an erasure of historical memory. Yet if we follow Laplanche's vitalist imperative to mine an inscription of desire within what Djebar would relegate to a sealed and sterile site, another option is presented. In Women of Algiers the scene of mourning opens two possibilities for reading a space of death within life, either as a foreclosed and unintelligible site that enables life to appear, or as a radioactive signature of contamination animating the vital order.
In Life and Death in Psychoanalysis Laplanche argues that Freud's turn to the primacy of the death drive represents a strange shift that betrays Freud's most radical insights. The death drive creates a closure on interpretation and analysis through its positing of a hermeneutic that would rewrite the drive as biological instinct. Yet Laplanche's critique does not rest with the inconsistency of this biological dogma in relation to Freud's earlier move to shatter notions of origin through his insistence on the radical separation of object and drive that appears in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), it also describes the ethical consequences that arise from the appearance of the death drive on the Freudian scene. As Laplanche suggests, ‘A conception of existence which (pessimistically or optimistically) relates human life to its finitude, would constitute, from the beginning, a refusal to take into account that calling into question necessitated by the discovery of the unconscious and of the shifts occurring within it’ (Laplanche 1985: 7). What is the call that Laplanche describes here, and why is it located within a discussion of an ethics of psychoanalysis? As he asks, ‘Might it be that death—human death as finitude and not the sole reduction to zero of vital tensions—finds its place, in psychoanalysis, in a dimension which is more ethical than explanatory?’ (Laplanche 1985: 6).
The ‘calling into question’ evoked in the passage above appears in what Laplanche names as the scene of seduction, where the nursing infant or young child experiences its initiation into the adult world through an exchange of sexually coded messages which it cannot decipher. In this process, the parameters of the unconscious are established through the failed translation of an enigmatic signifier; the latter is constituted through the sexual content of the messages exchanged between the adult human and the infant. This does not represent a scene of origin, but rather the possibility for scene itself, where the subject's condition of emergence appears in the form of a question that
cannot be answered. Primal repression is here already embedded within a social exchange, a contingent and culturally coded translation of messages; this immediately implicates the constitution of the psyche within a relation of exteriority shaped not only by the figure of the adult other, but also the adult's unconscious (See Laplanche 1992: 254–256). In this account of the relational constitution of the subject's pre-history, time is enfolded with the other and is neither before nor after the subject. However, it should be kept in mind that the untranslatability of the sexually coded messages of the other's unconscious establishes the possibility for scene. Laplanche's vitalist critique must be scrutinized under the same precepts he applies to Freud in order to see whether he himself falls prey to the very deathly limit on analysis for which he rebukes Freud.
Laplanche's scene of seduction and the site it creates for an awakening into social life dramatically rewrites Freud's account of the infant's initiation into the social. In particular, Freud's treatment of the Nebensmensch or fellow human being, can be used to understand why Laplanche contests Freud's description of the order of life through the death drive. Both the scene of seduction in Laplanche and Freud's depiction of the Nebensmensch offer accounts of subject formation through a series of exchanges between a human infant and an adult other that also operate as metaphors for the social relation as such. Yet whereas Laplanche suggests that the ‘call’ represents a mutually constituting series of exchanges between the unconscious of the infant and an adult other, Freud's Nebensmensch marks the beginning of life with the memory of death:
Let us suppose that the object which furnishes the perception resembles the subject (Nebensmensch). If so, the theoretical interest is also explained by the fact that such an object was simultaneously the subject's first satisfying object and further his first hostile object, as well as his sole helping power. For this reason it is in relation to a fellow human being that a human-being learns to cognize… Other perceptions of the object too—if, for instance, he screams—will awaken the memory of his own screaming and at the same time his own experience of pain. (Freud, 1950 [1895]: 331)
In Civilization and its Discontents the neighbour or fellow human being appears in Freud's discussion of the libidinal bonds that forge human communities and the perpetual threat of civilization's disintegration in response to innate aggressive instincts. Freud aligns the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself with the injunction to ‘Love thine enemies’ as one and the same relationship between the self and the neighbour to indicate how the death drive's role in the formation of the ego is mirrored in the destructive tendencies underwriting the formation of the social bond:
And there is a second commandment, which seems to me even more incomprehensible and arouses still stronger opposition in me. It is, “Love thine enemies”. If I think it over, however, I see that I am wrong in treating it as a greater imposition. At bottom it is the same thing. (Freud 1930: 109)
Within this account of awakening into social life, the neighbour represents that kernel of the outside which has suddenly become the nature of existence itself and thus an intrusive and frightening presence.
The relation ‘between neighbours’ read solely through the structuring logic of the death drive would designate what Laplanche describes as a ‘mute logos’ and a form of autism. Where for Freud the fellow human being appears as an interior figure of trauma in which the injunction to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ is akin to loving one's enemies, and the construction of subjectivity itself emerges as a screen against this trauma, Laplanche positions the encounter with the other's unconscious as a site of an ‘irreducible kernel, almost a quintessence of otherness’, that offers ‘the promise of a reopening’ (Laplanche 1999: 109). For Laplanche, reading the vital through the primacy of the death drive would represent a refusal to recognize the effervescent kernel of exteriority within the ego that calls the subject into social life.
Laplanche translates Freud's maxim, ‘If you would endure life, be prepared for death’ to read, ‘If you want life, prepare for the death of the other’, to emphasize the subject's location within a position of vulnerability in which ‘my life’ and the death of the other are radically interimplicated
(Laplanche 1985: 6). It is thus only through the possibility of the other's death that we would come to an understanding of our own mortality. This potential loss of the other as a condition for life extends Laplanche's theorization of the enigmatic kernel within the scene of seduction to the time of human life. What is ‘lost’ or untranslated within the scene of seduction, namely the enigmatic message of the other's desire and the constitution of the self in alterity, remains a question that structures the social bond. Laplanche will thus claim loss, and in particular the paradigm of mourning, as an ideal means of conceptualizing human temporality, ‘What more suitable terrain is there for this than that of loss: of the human being confronted with loss; to the extent that the dimension of loss is probably co-extensive with temporalisation itself… mourning is a kind of work, the work of memory’ (Laplanche 1999: 241). Laplanche's formulation of temporality within a dimension of loss irreducible to the subject thus works through a structure of alterity derived not from an intersubjective confrontation between self and other, but an intrasubjective series of exchanges between ‘the alien within me’ and the unconscious of the other.
However Laplanche's turn to mourning to conceptualize human temporality could be read as positing a hollowed out space within the order of life. Does this site of loss that establishes a structuring field for life reveal a critical tension in Laplanche? Just as Laplanche holds Freud to task for reading the vital order through the primacy of the death drive, we must also consider how Laplanche's reworking of Freud might suffer some of the same problems as Freud himself by falling into a closed circuit. In Laplanche's account, mourning as a metaphor for human temporality establishes a space of loss inside of life as providing the constituting possibility of life itself. Does this space establish a necessary form of death within Laplanche's vitalist reading of Freud, or does it operate as a means of breaking out of this circuit?
Within the logic of the closed circuit, Laplanche's enigmatic kernel posits a dimension of alterity held within the indefinite time of the ‘to be translated.’ In what Laplanche describes as ‘afterwardsness’, which makes its initial appearance in the scene of seduction but continues to structure the time of social life, Laplanche's kernel occupies an uneasy position of at once providing the condition of possibility for explanation
and, at the same time, remaining outside explanation itself. Within the scene of the psychoanalytic session, this holding forth of a carved out hollow renders possible the work of analysis:
It is maintaining the dimension of interior alterity which allows alterity to be set up in the transference. Interior relation, relation to the enigma. … I find there (in the unknown) something corresponding to what, for me, is the maintenance of the analyst's interpellation by the enigma; the maintenance which not only guarantees access to the diversity of desires, but truly creates, provokes transference (Laplanche 1999: 228–229).
The enigmatic interpellation described in the analytic session can also be considered a principle of operation for social explanation. For it is here, within the site of the primal repressed, that ‘the cultural’ finds its most preliminary articulations. Laplanche will describe ‘the deepest level, the primal repressed’ as ‘the privileged site of a ‘pure culture of otherness’ (Laplanche 1999: 107). Otherness here is a pure expression of culture in the sense that the fantasmatic kernel (the irreducible element of exteriority that constitutes the core of the subject's being) provides the site of opening through which the cultural can emerge as a locus of symbolic articulation, codes, and systems of meaning. Within this reading, the ‘pure culture of otherness’ which Laplanche describes does not represent a foundation, but rather the naked expression of the conditions that enable social intelligibility. However, in a theoretical framework continuously pushing to excavate the mythologies of all claims to origins and ‘pure’ foundational constructs, claiming a ‘pure culture of otherness’ erects a foundation for cultural life which itself resists explanation.
In his reading of Laplanche, John Fletcher (1999) raises a cautionary note regarding the implications of the ‘ballasts,’ which structure the field of the unconscious through the encounter with the enigmatic signifier. According to Fletcher, these ballasts are ‘thing like presentations’ which as a precondition for language and hence of sociality no longer signify anything other than themselves and thus threaten to rehears the ‘apophantic illusion’ of a ‘bedrock element or scene.’ I would push
Fletcher's reading a bit further, as the intersubjective relationship he describes in his reading of Laplanche seems to already hold subject and other in place, where for example ‘the enigma for the subject is located in the other, the other's already constituted Unconscious, and the seductive excitations of the other's desire as it bears on the subject’ (1999: 112). In contrast, Laplanche describes this movement as a form of binding/unbinding that resists the clear demarcation of a process of introjection in which the ‘other's already constituted Unconscious’ would bear upon the infant. As Laplanche states, the young child is never innocent, and ‘needs no teacher’. The scene of seduction itself is never a one-dimensional exchange, but rather a ‘labyrinth of reciprocal interaction between adult and child’ (Laplanche 1989: 111).
Yet Fletcher's note of caution takes on renewed significance when we turn back to the question of mourning in Laplanche to establish why the temporal structure Laplanche attributes to the work of mourning is the must suitable terrain for conceptualizing human temporality. If the operative logic of mourning coincides with human time in the postponed translation and perpetual working though of the other's desire, mourning's precondition is itself premised on an impossibility in working through the ‘pre-ambivalence of the message of the other’ (Laplanche 1999: 246). The opening created from the site of a ‘pure culture of otherness’ does not inaugurate a new origin; however, its founding possibility depends on a failure of translation that cannot be metabolized or worked through. Does Laplanche's delight in the enigma—as he says, ‘when I hear talk of enigmas I prick up my ears’—and his eagerness to retain its untranslatability present us with a deathly threshold of interpretation? (Laplanche 1999: 254) Whereas the enigmatic signifier is described as a point of saturated density that overflows with inscriptive capacity in the scene of seduction, the enigma could be used to define a foreclosure carried over into the time of human life. Let us see how this problem is presented in Laplanche's rereading of Freud on mourning.
Laplanche argues that Freud posits mourning as the ‘normal’ prototype for a melancholia that would be free of ambivalence and narcissistic consequences; this does not necessarily account for an unconscious experience of loss in mourning. In particular, a reduction of mourning to a solely conscious process fails to consider the enigmatic
message that continues to confront the subject in the aftermath of the other's death. ‘For the person in mourning, that message has never been adequately understood. Mourning is hardly ever without the question: what would he be saying now? What would he have said?’ (Laplanche 1999: 254). What cannot be worked through in mourning is the very same failure of translation, a primal incommunicability, originally characterized in the scene of seduction as establishing the structuring field of the unconscious. In Laplanche's analysis, the work of mourning in the literal aftermath of death follows this logic and radicalizes it. Indeed death accentuates rather than diminishes the enigma of alterity. The other's response cannot be known, and so it is the question itself, the original relationship to the enigma of the other, that creates what Laplanche will describe as a site of non-mourning inside mourning itself.
In order to provide an example of a cultural system built around recognizing this site of non-mourning, Laplanche turns to Freud's discussion in Totem and Taboo of a custom practiced among the Guaycurus in Paraguay. When a death occurs, the names of the tribe members, including that of the departed person, are changed. By changing the names, the tribe members establish a site of non-mourning within mourning that places the name in nontranslatable sacred space, thus enabling the operation of mourning to occur; ‘through the taboo on using the name, a space of non-mourning is set up inside which mourning, mourning for everything that remains, is possible’ (Laplanche 1999: 244–245).1 What does it mean to say that a space of non-mourning inside mourning creates the possibility for mourning itself to occur? According to Laplanche, human temporality is best described through a structure of mourning that moves out of a site of loss. However if this loss remains held inside mourning as the condition of a working through in life, does this site operate as a kind of hollow that gives shape to life? What is held inside this space of loss?
When we begin to read non-mourning as a carrying over of Laplanche's enigmatic message and its expression of a ‘pure culture of otherness,’ into human temporality, non-mourning could appear to establish a site in which social inscription is foreclosed. Indeed in his discussion of the taboo against using the names of the dead among the Guaycurus, Laplanche suggests that the name changing custom renders
history itself impossible; ‘What, then, does it mean to change all the names? It could be said that it draws the necessary consequences from the limitation of mourning. All the attributes of the dead person can be reworked: but his name is untouchable, impossible to metabolize. Thus the impossibility of doing a history of these societies’ (Laplanche 1999: 244 emphasis mine). Is non-mourning a hollowed out site in which history cannot be read, or could it operate like a sealed space that necessitates a careful excavation?
In order to present a possible answer to this question I would like to turn to a literary text, Assia Djebar's short story collection Women of Algiers in their Apartment, and shift the implications of Laplanche's discussion of mourning into a scene of historical memory in postcolonial Algeria. Djebar is engaged in a project that is in some measure complementary of Laplanche, in that she is also seeking a means of articulating a site of cultural intelligibility, which remains suspended on a threshold of translation. Like Laplanche, Djebar's attempt to put this site into motion takes place within a scene of mourning which is initially premised on a negation of historical memory. A space of non-mourning inside of mourning, or what could also be described as a condition of access for cultural intelligibility, is established in Djebar's Women of Algiers where she depicts a lost culture of women whose eclipse heralds the consolidation of a new national order. Yet even as Djebar romanticizes a site of profound loss, her text suggests the presence of a proleptic figure of feminine agency whose contradictory voice at once testifies to her status as a placeholder of absence and voices a demand for a new form of recognition. Laplanche's space of non-mourning, which threatens in his analysis to operate as a foreclosed bedrock that enables, but remains outside of translatability, is thus reinscribed by Djebar as a vitally contaminated site of desiring agency.
In the stories ‘Regard Interdit, Son Coupé’, (Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound) and the scene of a women's mourning ritual in ‘Les Morts Parlent’ (The Dead Speak), from Women of Algiers, Djebar bears witness to a muteness in a feminine historical inheritance whose voice has been undercut and expelled from the living memory of the present. Djebar's text suggests that, as a result of the French colonization of Algeria and the extent to which women's bodies provided a literal and
symbolic battleground for cultural authenticity in colonial as well as nationalist discourse, possibilities for women's social agency have been dramatically reduced. In Djebar's historical critique, the figure of the mother represents the only remaining culturally sanctioned expression of feminine agency. The feminine voices that for Djebar characterized the culture of pre-colonial Algeria in their nurturing of a distinct ‘emotional memory’ in love songs, ballads, and expressions of desire, have been lost to what Djebar describes as an ‘autism’ of the present and the indoctrination of women within a ‘cult of silence’ (Djebar 1992: 145).
In the segment of Women of Algiers entitled, ‘The Dead Speak,’ Djebar's cultural and historical critique is shifted into a scene of mourning witnessed through the eyes of Aïcha, a young woman whose pursuit of a forbidden love has rendered her a social outcast. Seen through Aïcha's eyes, the scene of mourning is cast not only as a gathering to commemorate a family death, but is also linked in Djebar's narrative to a collective loss. The text laments a vanished world of a unique feminine culture in pre-colonial Algeria embodied by what is now a powerless and trembling choir of female mourners. As the scene is narrated from Aïcha's perspective, a form of cultural death that becomes intelligible through the voice of one already confined to a social death suggests a repeated inscription of foreclosure, a space of non-mourning inside mourning, which operates through the multiple historical layers of Djebar's text.
Aïcha's interior voice thus appears as an italicized echo in the story, an ‘I’ that narrates the scene through a description of the voice's own role in crafting an architecture of representation. The voice of the ‘I’ thus repeatedly names its responsibility for the measurement and calculation of distances that it describes as a relationship between the living and the dead. In composing a space for representation the ‘I’ speaks to describe the shape of its silence:
I their inaudible voice, I meticulously reestablish the distances, I reevaluate the relationships… I who inexorably establish a more and more oceanic distance between the most vibrant of the witness bearing sorrows and the staggering sealed absence, I…who? (Djebar 1992: 79).
Like Laplanche's enigmatic message, this is a logic of composition which maintains an essential site for the incommunicable. Djebar's positioning of the ‘I,’ a singular witness who gathers the collective within a grammatical place-holder of absence is left to measure the ambiguity of muteness as its composing logic. The final pages of ‘The Dead Speak’ end on a note of cynicism, heralding the new era of independence as a time that will erect its foundations upon a sealed closure witnessed by the voice of the ‘I’. In this sense Djebar's text composes a landscape of historical erasure, silence, and absence that appears to leave no opening outside of the sealed enclosure in which the chorus of mourners and Aicha are given voice. Yet by memorializing this lost culture within a scene of mourning Djebar's text itself renders the effective closure of a collectivity of feminine voices by taking the form of a testimony that romanticizes a cultural inheritance and declares its consignment to historical oblivion.
Djebar's lamentation of a lost feminine emotional memory which ‘no longer hums with the whisperings of an ancillary tenderness, of lost ballads-in short, with a romanticism of vanished enchantments- that world suddenly, barrenly becomes the world of autism’ moves too hastily to affirm an irrecoverable site of cultural loss (Djebar 1992: 148). The lost literature Djebar describes remains accessible within historical record, yet invoking the romance of its disappearance fails to seek out a means of reading the richness of an archive to not only critique the present, but also to find a pathway out of the sealed oblivion evoked in Djebar's narrative. How might non-mourning be reread to provide such an opening?
Following Laplanche's attempt to reread Freud and put him to work in spite of himself, I would like to suggest that Laplanche's treatment of mourning trespasses against his own attempts to shatter the notion of an original, blank slate upon which ‘culture’ is imprinted. If the enigma itself is a contaminated message, the space of non-mourning inside of mourning that he describes cannot be said to foreclose historical inscription. To consider this possible trajectory within Djebar's text we must turn back inside the dense texture of Aicha's silence to read a moment of transgression that will radiate outside the scene of mourning in Women of Algiers. How might a feminist project take
shape within the text's inscription of a silent space of historical memory?
Aïcha's testimony to the empty power of the mourners begins to emerge as a site of fracture in her murmuring of a phrase that interrupts the repeated invocation of the mourner's recitation of the Qur'an. Aïcha's prayer, ‘I have one God, and Muhammad is his prophet’ is interrupted by a refrain that begins inside her. ‘An unexpected phrase, whose words moved her with a vengeance. They frightened her. “I have neither law nor master” (Djebar 1992: 84). Almost ‘indecent’ and ‘clashing with the words of the prayer that were audible’. Aïcha's refrain in Women of Algiers is not given an immediate context in which to assume a form of agency, but is held as a prefiguration of a critique which Djebar levies at one and the same time against the Algerian nationalist movement and a patriarchal tradition of Qur'anic interpretation (Djebar 1992: 88).
Even as Women of Algiers does not immediately appear to engage in what could be described as a project of Islamic feminism, the interruption of Aïcha's refrain ‘I have neither law nor master’ into the recitations of the Qur'an in the scene of mourning suggests a possible prefiguration of this form of feminine subjectivity. In Djebar's later novel Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, this figure achieves a fuller articulation in a critique of an ‘acid erosion’ in the transmission of Islam, andhere we can begin to see a hint of her emergence (Djebar 1993: 169). Aïcha's interruption of the prayer signals a reinscription of the sacred order and evokes the practice of textual reinterpretation claimed by feminist scholars through ijtihad, or interpretation. It is an attempt to create a site of opening for an ethical, gender egalitarian Islam.2 While Women of Algiers forecloses this possibility in its memorialization of a lost culture of women consigned to the space of an echo within a parenthesis, if it is mined for its foreclosed articulations of desire the voice of the ‘I’ offers a potential new horizon of cultural intelligibility.
Djebar's Women of Algiers and Laplanche's rereading of Freud thus share an unexpected terrain. Both their projects establish a structure of critique premised on a site of death within life, which sustains the possibility for cultural explanation itself. In both cases, a space of non-mourning inside mourning, ‘in which mourning for everything that remains is made possible’ establishes a foreclosed site. In Laplanche's
case, he forecloses historical inscription; in Djebar's case, she seals feminine agency within a romantic and irrecuperable past. Yet Laplanche's site of non-mourning can be simultaneously posed as a critical point of entry into a register of cultural production whose articulation remains on a threshold of translation, but as a saturated, vitally contaminated opening into the social.
Laplanche frames his rereading of Freud in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis as a project that demonstrates how Freud's turn to the death drive is a hermeneutic for psychoanalysis. It initiates a foreclosure of the ethical relationship, which characterizes the interaction between the human infant and the adult other in the scene of seduction. Within Freud's account of the primacy of the death drive, the ego is configured as an initial mass bound by a limit or envelope, which is shattered by the encounter with the Nebensmensch. For Laplanche, this understanding of the constitutive structures of social life culminates in a sociality premised on sterility and self preservation:
From then on, every living individual will be seen as closed in on itself at the outset, a solipsistic monad which would be the arena of the infernal struggle of the two great drives—of life and death—and which would open to the exterior only because it was necessary to expel death (original self-destruction)… to be able to live. (Laplanche 1992: 206)
Yet when Laplanche writes, ‘Death is perhaps rediscovered in the unconscious as the most radical—but also the most sterile—principle of its logic’, he offers an opening out of the limits of interpretation posed by locating the death drive as the most fundamental composing element of the ego, by affirming how desire rather than a form of death creates the possibility for social life to emerge. Laplanche thus offers a project of critique which would attempt to read the most primary moments of human interaction through their culturally inscribed logic. To reinscribe desire into the mute logos of the death drive is to effect a vital contamination of this sterile evacuation and to rewrite the ‘living human’ by definition ‘saturated from head to foot by the invasion of the cultural, which is by definition intrusive, stimulating, and sexual’
(Laplanche 1992: 225). The question of mourning poses a complication to this project in that the enigma of the other's desire, enabling the possibility of translation, cannot be deciphered and so creates a ‘ghostly’ space within the order of life. Yet as we have seen, this enigma cannot be understood as a sterile self-referent in that it is always already contaminated by a history of desire.
Djebar's Women of Algiers offers a means of reading the implications of Laplanche's structure of critique in a ‘space of non-mourning inside mourning’. Her lamentation for a lost culture of women enacts a process of mourning that forecloses the possibility of feminine agency within the postcolonial political landscape. The figure of Aicha haunts the scene of mourning because it unfolds from her perspective as a social outsider whose act of rebellion cannot be rendered legible within the text. If the dead speak in Djebar's text, they do so from a site that gives voice to a hollowed out form consigned to oblivion. To read their figures from within a narrative that sustains their deathly inscription in the culture of postcolonial Algeria would be to succumb to a romanticized abdication and a refusal to address the question posed by a feminine subject doubly foreclosed within Djebar's text. Djebar suggests that Laplanche's premise that the social relationship is based on a message which cannot be deciphered forecloses the possibility of mining the content of this message itself. To read this message otherwise, we have to put Laplanche to work and excavated the historical inscription of a space of non-mourning inside of mourning from which ‘culture’ itself achieves its possibility of articulation. If a certain ethic in relation to death could be evolved from the Laplanchian model, it would be an ethics of reading which would attempt to decipher the coded logics of desiring subjectivities that at one and the same time give shape to the contours of representation and remain suspended on the threshold of life.
In the original text the line reads; ‘est ménagé un espace de non-deuil à l'intérieur duquel le deuil, le deuil de tout le reste, est possible.’ J. Laplanche (1992) La révolution copernicienne inachevée: Travaux 1967–1992.
See for example, A. Wadud (1999) Qur'an and Woman: Rereading the sacred text from a woman's perspective, A. Barlas (2002) Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal interpretations of the Qur'an, and F. Mernissi (2002) The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam as examples of feminist scholarship that envision an ethical gender egalitarian Islam through a project of ijtihad.