Exil et (d)énonciation ou Assia Djebar : l'écriture, l'urgence

Abstract

In common-day language, and above all in some media discourses, it became quite usual to associate « French », « French language » and « francophone » to ideas of « crisis » or to arguments of « polemics ». What to think then about a novel called La Disparition de la Langue Française (2003, The Disappearance of the French Language), written by an Algerian female novelist, who was meanwhile elected to the French Academy ? Would this be another Jeremiad about the decline of the French language and culture or about the perversities of a global scale monolinguism ? Having as its background the « horizon of expectations » created by these varied paratextual apparatus, directly or indirectly called upon by the work itself, the analysis suggested here tries to explore the symbolic contradiction of the aforementioned novel in dialogue with other texts by Assia Djebar, in order to emphasize what somehow emerges as a sign of restlessness regarding the French language. The main effort will be to show how exile (both of the character and of the author), more than a simple set of circumstances, points towards a plurivocal and intercultural structure of (d)enunciation, that articulates risk and freedom regarding the current situation, even though it goes well beyond it.