Narratives of Catastrophe: Boris Diop, ben Jelloun, Khatibi

By Nasrin Qader

Narratives of Catastrophe tells the story of the relationship between catastrophe, in the senses of "down turn" and "break," and narration as "recounting" in the senses suggested by the French term récit in selected texts by three leading writers from Africa.

Qader's book begins by exploring the political implications of narrating catastrophic historical events. Through careful readings of singular literary texts on the genocide in Rwanda and on Tazmamart, a secret prison in Morocco under the reign of Hassan II, Qader shows how historical catastrophes enter language and how this language is marked by the catastrophe it recounts. Not satisfied with the extra-literary characterizations of catastrophe in terms of numbers, laws, and naming, she investigates the catastrophic in catastrophe, arguing that catastrophe is always an effect of language andthought,. The récit becomes a privileged site because the difficulties of thinking and speaking about catastrophe unfold through the very movements of storytelling.

This book intervenes in important ways in the current scholarship in the field of African literatures. It shows the contributions of African literatures in elucidating theoretical problems for literary studies in general, such as storytelling's relationship to temporality, subjectivity, and thought. Moreover, it addresses the issue of storytelling, which is of central concern in the context of African literatures but still remains limited mostly to the distinction between the oral and the written. The notion of récit breaks with this duality by foregrounding the inaugural temporality of telling and of writing as repetition.

The final chapters examine catastrophic turns within the philosophical traditions of the West and in Islamic thought, highlighting their interconnections and differences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Aug 25, 2009
• ISBN: 9780823230501

Book preview

NARRATIVES OF CATASTROPHE

NARRATIVES OF CATASTROPHE

Boris Diop, ben Jelloun, Khatibi

Nasrin Qader

Copyright © 2009 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Qader, Nasrin.

Narratives of catastrophe: Boris Diop, Ben Jelloun, Khatibi / Nasrin Qader.

      p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-3048-8 (cloth: alk. paper)

1. African fiction (French)—History and criticism. 2. Diop, Boubacar Boris, 1946–—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Ben Jelloun, Tahar, 1944–—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Khatibi, Abdelkebir, 1938–—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Disasters in literature. 6. Storytelling in literature.

I. Title.

PQ3984.Q33 2009

843′.9140996—dc22

2008046782

Printed in the United States of America

11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

For my parents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 Becoming-Survivor

CHAPTER 2 Suffering Time

CHAPTER 3 Shadowing the Storyteller

CHAPTER 4 Un-limiting Thought

CHAPTER 5 Figuring the Wine-Bearer

CONCLUSION Engendering Catastrophes

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

I do not know where to begin acknowledging all those who have guided my steps and propelled my thought as I made my way, often falteringly, through this project. While thinking and writing demand solitude from us, they simultaneously provoke us to converse, at times silently, and at other times loudly, furiously, humorously, and even with exaggerated theatricality. To all those named and not named here, who have shared with me the rich moods of their own thinking and have indulged and tolerated mine, I am forever grateful.

Special thanks are due to Hédi Abdel-Jaouad and Steven Winspur for their patient reading of the manuscript and judicious comments and suggestions. The final version of the book owes much to their insights. Their enthusiasm and commitment to this project have been a source of great encouragement for me. I want to extend my gratitude to all my colleagues in the department of French and Italian at Northwestern University for their interest in my work and for their unfailing support during my years in the department. I am especially grateful to my mentor, Michal Ginsburg, whose intellectual rigor and generosity with her time and patience have provided the necessary challenge and support for the successful completion of this book. Similarly, I offer my heartfelt gratitude to Jane Winston for her continued interest in the development of my work in general and this project in particular. Her careful and perspicacious readings of various versions of the manuscript have pushed my thinking and writing in valuable and fertile directions.

Additionally, I wish to thank Ahmed Bouguarche, Penelope Deutscher, Doris Garraway, José Kagabo, Brenda Machosky, Alessia Ricciardi, Rainer Rumold, David Schoenbrun, Aliko Songolo, Christopher Yu, Akbar Virmani, and Samuel Weber for their stimulating and thoughtful feedback. Thanks to Mireille Rosello for her unfailing enthusiasm for this project from the beginning. I would like to extend special thanks to my dear friend, colleague, and mentor Souleymane Bachir Diagne, whose imprints have enriched my work in ways I cannot count. Domietta Torlasco has been an invaluable interlocutor and an inspiration. Similarly, Kevin Bell has generously shared with me the singular luminosity of his own remarkable thinking on questions dear to us both. Fariba Zarinebaf has been an incomparable source of support over the years. I am deeply indebted to these intellectual complicities and friendships. Thanks to Anil Lal for not only helping me disentangle some of the knots of my thinking and writing with his precise questions and illuminating suggestions but also for always reminding me of the pressing ethical demands of thinking, writing, and living in the world.

I extend my deep gratitude to Abdelkebir Khatibi and Boubacar Boris Diop, who, as fortune would have it, were visiting Northwestern in the final phases of this project. It was a rare honor and a singular privilege for me to engage with them about their own work as well as on general questions about literature and politics. I am also thankful to my students in the two seminars organized around aspects of this work, L’aimance, l’amour, le corps de l’écriture and Sovereignty and African Literatures. Their probing questions and assiduous readings have been indispensable in developing some of my arguments. Thanks to Tassadit Yacine at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales for allowing me to present several segments of this book to her seminar, Domination et Ambiguïté, in the spring of 2006. The feedback from these conversations was immensely helpful to me.

For my early intellectual formation, I am grateful to Próspero Saíz’s individual guidance and many challenging and provocative seminars during the final years of graduate school at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The investigative paths of this project would not have been possible without the daring modes of questioning and subtle readings of literary and theoretical texts performed by students in these seminars under his supervision.

My most heartfelt gratitude and affection go to my family. I dedicate this book to my parents, Abdul and Nooria Qader, who had the vision to allow me to pursue my passion for literature and made the conditions for this pursuit possible. Thanks to my sister Afsana, my brothers Mirwais and Timur and their families, Nassreen, Benafsha, little Xavier, Darian, and Shabnam for their encouragement, support, and, most important, for all the joyful play and laughter so utterly necessary for thinking.

Last but certainly not least, many thanks to Helen Tartar, whose kindness and professional integrity and vision have allowed this work to finally see the light of day. I am deeply grateful to Philip Bansal for his meticulous and perceptive copy editing of the manuscript. Thanks to Eric Newman, Tom Lay, Kathleen Sweeney, Miriam Exum, and the rest of the team at Fordham University Press for all their hard work and patience.

The completion of this project was made possible by a faculty fellowship from Northwestern University’s Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities for the 2005–6 academic year.

NARRATIVES OF CATASTROPHE

Introduction

From Récit to Catastrophe: Tracing Dispersions

This project is the culmination of years of thinking through some of my dissatisfactions regarding the field of African literature and its relationship with certain theoretical directions in literary studies in general. While African literature in general (and specifically Francophone African literature, the primary area of my study) has been, since the second half of the twentieth century, one of the most fecund fields of literary production, it remains on the margins of literary studies. Though many American and European universities have specialists in African literatures and though Francophone literature has gained a place of visibility for itself, the study of African literature still remains the business of the few: not incorporated into literary and theoretical discussions and developments in general, still framed primarily by the discourse of postcoloniality. Moreover, the critical and theoretical discourse on African literatures, both within and without the continent, has been dominated by the political, social, or anthropological, rendering texts documents. Even those who admit that the literary is not the same phenomenon as the social, the political, or the cultural have not always managed to escape the pitfalls of appropriating literature for these domains.¹

The historical relationship of African literatures with anthropology has been difficult to debunk. Simon Gikandi, in a speech at the African Literature Association Conference in 2000, gave voice to the frustration of many in the field when he spoke about his experiences teaching Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. He explained the difficulties and the resistances he confronts in trying to break with the overarching tendency to render the main character, Okonkwo, immediately representative of the Igbo people and culture. Gikandi imputes the origin of the problem to the discourse of modernity, especially its valorization of rationality and universal reason, arguing that by repudiating difference from the center of its production, namely Europe, it did not eliminate difference but rather pushed it toward the margins of Europe, in this case, Africa.² In Francophone African literature, Camara Laye’s L’enfant noir has had a similar fate.³

As a student of African literatures, I too went through the stage where I pored over texts from both Francophone and Anglophone traditions with focused ethnographical and anthropological attention. I read through these lenses writers as diverse as Camara Laye, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Bessie Head, and Cheikh Hamidou Kane. It may be true that some texts lend themselves to such appropriations and as a result circulate more easily, while others remain unread, untranslated, uncommented upon, or even unheard of and quickly go out of print precisely because of their resistance to such overarching assumptions of representation and documentation. This project turns to some of these sites of resistance and attempts to show the dynamics of these resistances. The aim is not to propose a literature devoid of political, ethical, or cultural import but rather to investigate how these dimensions find singular articulations in specific texts that may exceed documentation and overparticularization, that is texts that are more than documents of a culture.⁴

My interest in storytelling was prompted primarily by the centrality of this question in the context of African literatures. Orality versus literacy remains one of the central problematics in discussions in this field. It is undebatable that oral cultures have strong storytelling traditions and that these traditions of storytelling help develop the imaginations of writers from these cultures. And clearly there are differences between a scene of oral storytelling and one of writing, in the strict sense of these activities. However, it does not follow that an African literary text that features storytelling refers itself to the oral traditions or wishes to duplicate or mimic this tradition. In other words, while I do not wish to reduce the differences between the oral and the written (I do not deal with this specific problem in this project since I do not work with oral works), I contest the deeply rooted division between orality and writing as the primacy of one over the other in the context of writing by African authors.

The notions of continuity between oral and written as well as the authenticity and the primacy of one over the other have been critiqued by African and non-African scholars. Eileen Julien, for example, with whom I agree, has consistently argued that one must neither conceive of the African novel as a linear continuation of oral traditions, nor see oral elements in the novel as signs of authenticity.⁵ I want to go further by showing through the notion of récit that a certain unfolding of temporality is the condition for the possibility of storytelling. The story comes forth from a turning and an overturning in thought and in language, both marked by a temporal rupture, a catastrophe. Because both genres (oral and written) have catastrophe as their condition of possibility, récit’s relationship with catastrophe puts into question any claims to the originality or authenticity of the oral tradition and to the continuity between the oral and the written.

I have chosen several texts whose central scenes are constituted by storytelling. I assemble here five novels:Murambi, le livre des ossements (Murambi, the Book of Bones) and Le Cavalier et son ombre (The Rider and His Shadow) by Boubacar Boris Diop of Senegal, Cette aveuglante absence de lumière (This Blinding Absence of Light) by Tahar ben Jelloun of Morocco, and Amour bilingue (Love in Two Languages) and Le livre du sang (The Book of Blood) by Abdelkebir Khatibi of Morocco. I bring these texts together through a sustained investigation of the relationship between récit and catastrophe.

If I could have, I would have given this book the French title Récits de catastrophes rather than Narratives of Catastrophe, for I use the word récit, which I translate as narration or story, in senses that exceed the traditional meanings of narrative. Generally, like narrative, récit refers to what is told, in speech or in writing, not limited to literary and epistemological categories such as the novel, the short story, the autobiography, history, philosophy, and myth. But more specifically, the genre récit distinguishes itself from the genres of fiction strictly defined as imaginary. In this sense, récit designates the story of an event in a life, a slice of life, and therefore gestures in the direction of veracity in ways that the novel, poetry, tale, and short story do not. However, beyond the delimitations of genres and categories, the verb réciter indicates repetition as in recounting and reciting, thus allowing récit to resonate with these senses. Récit, as I will show, is not a simple telling but rather a telling once again. Even when a récit is told for the first time, it already implies repetition. Récit, therefore, foregrounds a temporality of repetition as the possibility of every narrative. We know that narrative is about time in its various modalities of linearity, circularity, and flashback. However, repetition refers not only to narrative structure per se—which often includes repetition within it—but also and especially to the initial impulse for narration, for storytelling. The repetition I associate with récit highlights the very possibility of repeatability as storytelling, where nothing can return to the same, where no recuperation of a life story can be possible by the subject. Perhaps it is better to say that in the récit the story of a life comes to the subject at a distance from the subject and by distancing the subject from his or her own story. With the notion of récit in the sense of recounting, I propose that storytelling does not set itself up against writing, nor does it return to an oral tradition that precedes writing; rather, it reveals the condition for the possibility of speaking, both orally and in writing. The self-reflexivity of the texts presented here makes the questions of storytelling and the story primarily literary questions.

I relate récit to catastrophe for two reasons. First, because récit announces the distance of the subject from itself; subjectivity suffers a turn in the récit. Instead of coming back to itself, in the récit, the subject oscillates and loses its foothold. Récit in this sense does not annihilate the subject, but rather in it subjectivity becomes inscribed as distancing, as turning away, as refusal. Secondly, récit as repetition is catastrophic for thought and language because it introduces a turn in language and thought from the conceptual and the referential (we will see shortly why I associate catastrophe with turn). These two dimensions are clearly related since the subject thinks itself and speaks itself at a distance from itself. In other words, in the relation between récit and catastrophe, the whole question of the thinking and the speaking subject is at stake. I also maintain that since catastrophe as rupture within the thinking and speaking subject is the very condition for the possibility of récit as repetition, it is strangely affirmative.⁶

I similarly insist on the notion of singularity because there has been a tendency on the part of African and non-African scholars to speak of cultures, literatures, and philosophies in the context of Africa monolithically.⁷ In other words, I do not propose that these texts by these authors are representative of anything specifically African or even Francophone African.⁸ I would like to suggest that these works are singular instances of writing and storytelling, just as every story is always singular, even if it is told exactly the same way again and again. This singularity helps us think certain questions about literature, about writing, about speech, about thinking, and about their relationship with time. I approach these texts in Abdelkebir Khatibi’s terms of écriture pensante (thinking writing), meaning that these scenes of récit think themselves and help us think. They are singular sites of thinking or thinking singularities that nevertheless engage with thinking in general. Thinking itself becomes the central question of the final two chapters of the book.

In addition to these literary concerns, my turn to the question of catastrophe was a reaction to a certain political discourse on Africa and to theoretical and philosophical thinking on catastrophe. On a daily basis, we need not look too long in the media or the academy to find catastrophe related to Africa. The continent apparently is an endless scene of catastrophes. War, famine, and disease fill the pages of our newspapers and have become focal points of much of our academic concerns. Africa, as a whole, has become our most efficient metaphor for disaster. Organizations, policy makers, students, researchers, artists, primarily from the economically and politically dominant nations, are constantly scrambling to save Africa, often allegedly from itself.⁹ I leave the daunting complexity of these actions—at times helpful, ethical, and necessary, and at other times harmful and replete with hypocrisy, shortsightedness, racism, colonialism, and imperialism—for another time. I focus only on the fact that despite this preponderant relatedness of Africa and catastrophe, theoretical considerations of catastrophe as a problem, as a literary dynamic, and as a philosophical direction for thinking excludes Africa almost entirely. In other words, we somehow already know what catastrophe is and Africa is the scene of its reality. As a result, discussions of catastrophe in African literatures remain limited to those texts that represent real events and that allegedly confirm what we already know about Africa. The texts I study here address catastrophe in other ways than to simply represent the catastrophes of Africa and confirm preconceived, ideological views. I want to turn my attention to the catastrophic dimensions of storytelling and investigate how these literary texts from the continent of Africa contribute in singular ways to our thinking on catastrophe as a problem for speaking, thinking, and writing. In other words, I argue that in the texts gathered here we are pushed to grapple with the question of what kind of a thing, a dynamic, a movement is a catastrophe; what can be and cannot be said about it. The political and ethical dimensions are pressing in each of these works, and in very different ways, but these dimensions unfold in each work in ways that give us singular opportunities for thinking theoretically and philosophically.¹⁰

I investigate the relationship between récit and catastrophe by tracing the movements of each narration, for, as I have said, I insist on this singularity, which should not be confused with the traditional concept of singularity as the absolutely unique that can be said once and only once about one place, since this traditional notion does not allow for repetition. Rather, singularity in my work belongs to the temporality of repetition of always-once-more, as outlined earlier. Thus my notion of récit joins up with singularity, because in singularity repetition is thought of as the inscription of difference and the dispersion of the unique.¹¹ This singularity as dispersion and difference rotates the more common uses of the concept of the singular toward openness. Absolutely unique singularity is exemplified most effectively by the concept of God, but it is not limited to this concept. The conceptual framework as such and the logic of signification partake of the singular in the sense of unique and unified because they gather and unify all differences and assign to thought and to language a metaphysical foundation to which diversity, plurality, and openness are secondary. In each récit, I show how this metaphysical logic undergoes a crisis and how this crisis may be another name for catastrophe.

But catastrophe is clearly not always this affirmative turn in literary and speaking possibilities. There are political and historical catastrophes to which several of the texts I study bear witness. One must not become too jubilant about the possibilities of catastrophe for literature and forget the utterly destructive dimension of catastrophes for people and nations. I will show how the two dimensions of catastrophe communicate, that is, how and in what sense the inscription of catastrophic events in literature opens something affirmative in the heart of total destitution—not because destitution is affirmative, but because the story is. So long as there is storytelling, something remains, in spite of everything. This remainder must be thought because this literary possibility is ethically and politically necessary. In the end, when all has fallen into the abyss of annihilation, survival must be imagined, inscribed, thought. The récit resounds with the voice of this survival; it is the aftereffect of catastrophe that it cannot repeat except from a distance and at a distance and through distancing. The stories of survivors come to them from a distance; they repeat these stories in the récit but without the ability of ascertaining that these are indeed their stories. The survivor thinks and speaks in the récit in a faltering manner and with great uncertainty as to whether what happened indeed happened. The story becomes both the affirmation of a memory and the affirmation of a radical destitution leaving its marks within the subject’s language and thought.

The Greek katastrophein (to overturn) is a composite of kata (down) and strophein (turn), which implies overturning, a shift in direction.¹² Catastrophe is commonly thought of as synonymous with disaster. The first recorded meaning of sudden disaster dates back to 1748. The two senses of suddenness and turn inscribe the word within a temporality that implies a doubling back of time. The association with disaster as star breaking, to borrow Geoffrey Hartman’s words in Holocaust and Hope, is clearly connected to this down turn in two ways. First, star breaking implies a break in the course of destiny. This sense recovers the oldest use of the word in the context of tragic drama, where the break reveals an unexpected turn in the fate of the tragic hero. Second and equally important for this book, star breaking implies a break in the transcendental trajectory of thought and language. Hartman’s etymology is given to us in the context of a discussion of Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster, where writing, for Blanchot, is not limited to the strict sense of writing but rather to the very possibility of all telling and writing, in the sense of récit elaborated here. The sudden turn in trajectory and the break in the upward impulse—be it as meaning, concept, or divine—are located within language and as language. I use catastrophe in the sense of a rotation, sudden and unexpected, in language and in thought brought about by a rupture and dispersion. Catastrophe marks the moments of contact between language, thought, and the surfaces of beings, things, and events. In this contact, sudden and unexpected, thought and language cannot return to themselves as grounds for self-certainty and knowledge. Instead, with the touch of these surfaces, both language and thought refract, disperse, and change direction and orientation. These dispersions, refractions, and reorientations are not places of annihilation of thought and language. The récit retrieves something out of these dispersive contacts, but it does not recapture the instant of contact. In other words, the récit does not gather the event within itself, by naming and repeating it, but rather comes about because the event has always already dispersed itself. The instant, as singularity, resists capture and withdraws from its instantaneity so that time unfolds. In other words the singularity of the instant, singularity in the sense that I have outlined for this project, opens itself to relationality and thus the dispersion becomes the story. In this sense, catastrophe designates a singular crisis, in time, that is inaugural for each story; but a crisis that primarily disperses itself throughout the narration without interrupting its flow. The story comes forth as the aftereffect of this dispersive instant.¹³

Though the notion of catastrophe is old, its most provocative and insistent evaluations have come from recent studies on the Holocaust. These studies, from various disciplines, have been guided primarily by memoirs of survivors from concentration camps. The relationship between récit and catastrophe is not limited to the discipline of literature—indeed, it not only extends to but also forms the basis of many other fields of knowledge such as history, philosophy, myth, and theology. Years ago, Jean-François Lyotard announced that grand narratives, that is, totalizing discourses of knowledge, failed to ground knowledge and understanding, a failure which he encapsulated as the postmodern condition in his book by this title. Translated into my terms, this condition is due to the conjunction between récit and catastrophe, because catastrophe prevents narratives from stabilizing and grounding themselves in certainty. The theoretical corpus related to the Holocaust helps us think the question of catastrophe without necessarily rendering the Holocaust the unique catastrophic event, nor making it the origin of catastrophe or the last word on it. My insistence on the particular notion of singularity and on temporality allows us to think against chronology and outside the absolutist discourses of exemplarity and uniqueness. It allows us to think catastrophe in terms of contiguity and supplementarity rather than in terms of hierarchy.

Not only is catastrophe unexpected and shocking, it is also exceptional.¹⁴ This exceptionality is linked to the incalculable dimensions of catastrophe. Something immeasurable and incalculable is released in catastrophe. Because of this immeasure it cannot be reintegrated into the course of time, language, and thought. However, in spite of this immeasure, most of our modes of speaking and thinking about catastrophe, from the media to the academy, identify and qualify it. Some events are called catastrophic while others are not. Paradoxically, the immeasure of catastrophe becomes measured in numbers such as six million Jews, eight hundred thousand Tutsis and resistant Hutus, thousands displaced, millions of dollars in lost property. Therefore, there is an inherent contradiction in the discourse on catastrophe where immeasure ends up being measured in numbers of people or in monies lost or offered as reparation to survivors for their losses.¹⁵ In other words, catastrophe quickly falls into the logic of exchange and value. Furthermore, the paradox of measuring the immeasurable has given way to the ethical problem that Michael Rothberg aptly calls the hierarchy of suffering, that is, a discourse of equivalences.¹⁶ Comparing, for example, six million with eight hundred thousand relativizes catastrophe: the larger the number (of people or property), the bigger the catastrophe. Exceptionality becomes reduced to unique and incomparable. This is why singularity in the way that I have defined it is ethically important, for while it allows for the uniqueness of each event, of each instant of catastrophe, it is not satisfied with this as its sole condition. This singularity ethically opens itself toward other singularities and becomes relationality. We must not forget that the singularity of the catastrophic is not in its accumulative nature, the collective number of victims, but rather in its immeasurable effect on the subject, each and every subject. But this is not the only criterion for the catastrophic. Unfortunately, we now know all too well that the loss of some lives is considered, felt, and evaluated as less catastrophic than that of others.¹⁷ However, no matter what the number of victims, catastrophe remains both singular and immeasurable in its dimension. My notion of catastrophe as rotation and rupture, as a kind of unhinging that gives a sudden turn within thought and language in the subject relates singularity (each time, each subject), immeasure, and repeatability to each other. Récit, a story of life at a distance from life, a story of life at a distance from the subject, is turned toward the immeasure that the subject suffers.

The tendency toward measuring and numbering catastrophe signals our anxiety when we are faced with a catastrophe whose effects are unbearable for us. The immeasurable is unbearable; it does not fit within any frame of reference and knowledge. It marks the limit of thought and language. It leaves us vulnerable and exposed, each and every one of us. It challenges our relationship with our destiny by rendering our future fragile and uncertain. In the aftermath of a catastrophe, we face our destiny with unbearable trepidation. Quickly, we turn to measures of self-protection. We search obsessively for causes and effects, reasons, logic. Each story in this book tells of this anxiety and unbearable quality of catastrophe. In addition, large-scale disasters require of us practical responses in political, economic, humanitarian, and legal ways. We must justify these responses in quantitative and qualitative manners, beginning by naming the event, because how we name an event qualifies and justifies it in particular ways. We know the debates about giving the name genocide to events in the cases of Rwanda and Darfur. It does not suffice that something be deemed a catastrophe; it must have a name that distinguishes it from other events and places it within a hierarchy.

This frenzy toward naming is itself revelatory, because catastrophe also marks the catastrophe of naming, that is, the turning of the name from its own power. Not only do we refer to destructive events of history or nature as catastrophes, we also use this word to characterize the most trivial occurrences of our everyday life, such as the failed breakfast omelet. These two uses of the word reveal the degree to which catastrophe poses a problem for thought and language. Catastrophe shakes up the foundations of thinking and simultaneously marks a rupture within language’s powers of signification. The word catastrophe is not a stable referent and cannot name anything specific or a unified concept. We cannot answer the question What is catastrophe? but we can try to think how certain events may be catastrophic. This requires from us singular acts of thinking and speaking, each and every time. When speaking French, what do we mean when we say Je suis catastrophé(e) (I am catastrophied) by something? By exposing a break and a turn in thought and language, catastrophe challenges our ability to stabilize our thinking and our speech as such. If the name is generally thought of as the site where aspects are gathered into an identity that would render referentiality possible, the immeasurable disperses this power of the name and empties it of referential possibility. The turn in the etymology of catastrophe may help us think the turn in language and in thought that dispossesses them of the authority to name and to conceptualize, including the name and the concept catastrophe. For this reason the literary becomes the privileged site for this investigation.¹⁸

The ways in which events resist understanding and the crises they open in all modes of speech about them testify to the dispersive and immemorial dimensions of catastrophe in two ways. First, events repeat themselves endlessly. By now, it should be clear that the indignant cries of never again after each historical event ring quite hollow; they mean nothing, or hardly anything. This collapse of meaning may be the effect of the catastrophic that the never again tries to contain. Forgetfulness and repetition belong intimately to catastrophe. Second, the endless singular speech of survivors, often faltering under the effect of urgency and despair about being able to say what it wants to say, bears witness in an oblique fashion—that is, via its failures—to the catastrophic dispersion and the turn of language and thought from the event that provide the impulse for their narration.¹⁹ The survivor’s most urgent desire is to say something about the event. She lives in the hope that trying once more will perhaps allow her to say what she wants to say. Survivors do not tell their stories once and for all. If they speak once, they will speak endlessly, each time differently. The survivor and the writer share in this double relationship of possibility and impossibility with language: possibility because after a catastrophic event what remains is the story, always haunted—but in this quality the story thinks and allows us to think the horizon of a relationship with the future, with time. Impossibility, because the story’s very possibility lies in the always already destitution of what it wants to say, of its own inaugural moment. Catastrophe turns from itself, from what it names. What remains of it, this quality of name without power, gives the story. The story can neither liberate itself from catastrophe nor recover catastrophe. In this sense, the story is a survivor that lives with an immemorial memory that gives it breath. Jacques Derrida has shown us for decades and in multiple ways how in repetition time has already entered division and dispersion. Nothing could ever be said if repetition were not the very condition of speech.²⁰

I contend in this book that the texts gathered here come about under the effect of catastrophe. The literary registers catastrophe as an aftereffect. The récit does not refer to event as such but rather comes about as the aftereffect of its dispersion, an aftereffect that remains uncircumscribed by any cause.²¹ The catastrophic aftershock scatters itself in the récit and scatters the récit. Language breaks and turns, abandoning the project of bringing forth any event, that is, of gathering language back into the stability of the name and signification. The récit begins under the effect of this abandonment always already immemorial for the récit. The catastrophe of the récit lies in the fact that it undergoes the effect that it cannot localize. Whatever the récit relates, it does so as the aftereffect of