French Cultural Studies

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Diasporic Subjectivities
Colin Davis
French Cultural Studies 2006; 17; 335
DOI: 10.1177/0957155806068096
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French Cultural Studies

Diasporic Subjectivities
COLIN DAVIS
Royal Holloway, University of London

This article explores connections between the notion of diaspora and

theories of subjectivity and language, especially in the work of Sartre and
Derrida. In LEtre et le nant Sartre relates the pour-soi to the Jewish
Diaspora, and in Le Monolinguisme de lautre Derrida refers to his own
experience in Algeria to develop ideas about the originary alienation
from place and language. The diasporic subject has no home or language
of its own; it has no assurance of its place with a settled order which would
secure its sense of belonging or even its existence. Some of the epistemological, ethical and political aspects of this are explored with reference to
recent films and Camuss short story LHte.
Keywords: Camus, Derrida, diaspora, Sartre, subjectivity

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.

Moreover, diaspora is by no means a purely descriptive term; it has been

used in cultural studies as part of what Paul Gilroy calls (Gilroy, 2000: 127)
the emergent vocabulary of transcultural critical theory. The notion of
French Cultural Studies, 17(3): 335348 Copyright SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
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diaspora proposes an alternative to the politics and metaphysics of race and

nation, problematising (in Gilroys words, again) the cultural and historical
mechanics of belonging and breaking the simple sequence of explanatory
links between place, location and consciousness (Gilroy, 2000: 122). Despite
its association with forced dispersal, diaspora can also be anti-essentialist,
de-stabilising and subversive; diasporic identities are creolized, syncretized,
hybridized, and chronically impure cultural forms (Gilroy, 2000: 129).
In practice, the work of diaspora studies has largely been concerned with
the problems associated with displaced ethnic, cultural or religious groups,
reflecting both political urgencies and a relieved sense in some quarters that
our present intellectual moment is post-theoretical.1 The aim of this article
is to analyse some of the conceptual resources of the term diaspora,
particularly through its links with subjectivity, language and spectrality. To
conclude, the article looks briefly at Camuss short story LHte, which
explores the deadlock of the diasporic subject unable to belong where it is or
to return to a place where it belongs. My starting point here is the
observation that the displacement named by diaspora is conceptual as well
as geographical; and more specifically it operates within the modern
conception of subjectivity originating in Descartes and Kant.2 Their invention
of the modern subject entails a self-conscious failure to locate the subjects
proper place. In his Second Meditation Descartes expressed the subjects
unshakeable certainty that je suis quelque chose, but quite where that
quelque chose was to be found is another matter:
Je ne suis point cet assemblage de membres, que lon appelle le corps
humain; je ne suis pas un air dli et pntrant, rpandu dans tous ces
membres; je ne suis point un vent, un souffle, une vapeur, ni rien de tout
ce que je puis feindre et imaginer. (Descartes, 1953: 277)

Descartes expresses, as Christina Howells puts it (Howells, 1992: 322),

ambivalence with respect to the location of the subject, whether it lies in the
soul alone or in an intimate union of body and soul. The subject is both
irreducible to and inseparable from physical components; it is not to be
found entirely in the body nor anywhere other than in the body. The
Cartesian subject of doubt is, as Paul Ricoeur puts it (Ricoeur, 1990: 16),
dsancr or dplac, succumbing to crisis at the very moment of its
constitution. Kant radicalised this impossibility of locating the subjects
proper place by revealing a split at its core between its knowable, conditioned,
phenomenal dimension and its unknowable, free, noumenal dimension. If
Descartes is unsure about the subjects home, Kant more radically describes
a subject which cannot be at home because it cannot, and must,
simultaneously occupy two incommensurable sites. Ricoeur (Ricoeur, 1990:
27) refers to the je of philosophies of the subject as atopos, sans place
assure dans le discours. It is not merely decentred, because this would
imply the existence of a centre from which it could be removed (and to

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which it might conceivably return); rather, it is place-less, deprived of any

site that it could occupy as its own. The subject, this article suggests, has
something diasporic about it; and this in turn has ethical and political
consequences which bear directly on questions of belonging, nationhood
and migration.
The connection between subjectivity and diaspora is made by Sartre in
LEtre et le nant, where at one moment he describes what he calls the poursoi as diasporic. From the context it is clear that Sartre is thinking
specifically of the Jewish Diaspora: On dsignait dans le monde antique la
cohsion profonde et la dispersion du peuple juif du nom de diaspora.
Cest ce mot qui nous servira pour dsigner le mode dtre du Pour-soi: il est
diasporique (Sartre, 1943: 176). This observation comes in the course of a
discussion of temporality; and as in earlier parts of LEtre et le nant Sartre
uses spatial metaphors to suggest the impossibility for the pour-soi of
achieving self-coincidence in time. The pour-soi is distance de soi (Sartre,
1943: 116), un ailleurs par rapport lui-mme (11617), or simply l-bas
(143). Its proper place cannot be localised. Wherever it is, it is not here; and
its lack of rooted self-presence instigates the temporal process by which it
launches itself through time. Temporality is the dimension in which the
pour-soi undertakes the impossible project of attaining itself.
The diasporic pour-soi is a kind of ghost within the human machine
because it is neither here nor not here, neither present nor absent. Sartres
subject is haunted; and what it is haunted by is itself, and by its knowledge
that it can never fully find itself: je suis hant par cet tre que je crains de
rencontrer un jour au dtour dun chemin, qui mest si tranger et qui est
pourtant mon tre et dont je sais aussi que, malgr mes efforts, je ne le
rencontrerai jamais (Sartre, 1943: 418). Consciousness is described as cet
tre [qui] implique un tre autre que lui (Sartre, 1943: 29). Its being consists
in its lack of being. The Sartrean pour-soi is une prsence soi qui manque
dune certaine prsence soi et cest en tant que manque de cette prsence
quil est prsence soi (Sartre, 1943: 140); or as Sartre famously puts it
(1943: 117), it is a being qui nest pas ce quil est et qui est ce quil nest
pas. The pour-soi pursues a doomed project of self-coincidence. It desires to
be other than it is, but it can never attain what it wants without its desire
being instantaneously deflected elsewhere. It strains to be what it can never
be, and it can never achieve the impossible status of the en-soi-pour-soi in
which project and being would be at one.
So the pour-soi is haunted and diasporic insofar as it is not at home; it is
in exile, expelled from being, unable to return. Sartres reference to diaspora
alludes to the Jewish experience of expulsion at first to Babylon in the sixth
century BCE and then from Jerusalem under the Romans in the second
century CE. The Jews of the Diaspora are sent away from their home and
forced to live elsewhere.3 On the surface, at least, the notion of diaspora
relies on a settled distinction between homeland and exile and a series of

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FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 17(3)

related binaries: native/alien, insider/outsider, included/excluded, belonging/

intrusion. But this is to simplify both Sartres use of the term and the
experience of the Jewish Diaspora. In the passage which relates the pour-soi
to diaspora quoted above, Sartre insists that diaspora is la cohsion
profonde et la dispersion du peuple juif: it is both cohesion and dispersion;
it is the manner in which what is dispersed coheres with itself. Nearly 40
years after the publication of LEtre et le nant, in interviews with Benny
Lvy recorded shortly before his death, Sartre reiterated this insistence on
the link between the Jewish Diaspora and unity: Il fallait concevoir lhistoire
juive non seulement comme lhistoire dune dissmination des juifs travers
le monde, mais encore comme lunit de cette diaspora, lunit des juifs
disperss (Sartre and Lvy, 1991: 74). The unity-in-dispersion of the
Diaspora has nothing to do with what Sartre calls un rassemblement sur une
terre historique (Sartre and Lvy, 1991: 75). Diaspora must be distinguished
from exile, if exile is understood as entailing the possibility or the fantasy of
return to a lost homeland. The pour-soi has nowhere else to be other than
not-at-home. When Sartre calls diaspora a mode dtre, he is defining it as
the mode of being of that which cannot be, but which can only seek to be. In
the Jewish context, the Diaspora is not merely a geographical condition of
separation from Israel. The Diaspora and Israel are not just places; they are
also communities and spiritual conditions; so Israel is in Diaspora, and
Diaspora is the state (if not the State) of Israel. When Sartre says that the
pour-soi is diasporic, he is also saying that its home, its proper place, is the
exile of diaspora; and the Jewish experience of the Diaspora is also the
human experience of what it means to be a subject.
The biblical precedent for the term diaspora is attributed to Deuteronomy
28:25, translated in the King James Bible as [thou] shalt be removed into all
the kingdoms of the earth. The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible known
as the Septuagint has, in a literal English version, thou shalt be a diaspora in
all kingdoms of the earth. Etymologically diaspora refers to the spreading or
scattering of seed; it is formed from the Greek verb diaspeirein, made up of
the prefix dia- (about, across) and speirein (to sow, to scatter). This
etymology prompts two observations. First, already in the etymological
sense there is no implication that the place in which the seed originates is
the proper place to which it should return; on the contrary, seed fulfils its
role by being scattered, by not remaining with its parent stock, and by taking
its chances of implanting itself away from its point of departure. Braziel and
Mannur underscore the positive connotations of the etymology of diaspora
when they note (Braziel and Mannur, 2003: 4) that it suggests the (more
positive) fertility of dispersion, dissemination, and the scattering of seeds.
Second, as is hinted in this quotation (and in Sartres comment quoted in the
previous paragraph), there is an etymological and conceptual link between
diaspora and dissemination. The term dissemination, which it is now
impossible to separate from Derridas use of it, translates the Greek diaspora

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into a Latinate vocabulary. Dissemination also describes the dispersion of

seed or of semen or of sense; so Derridas reflection on dissemination is also
a way of relating to diaspora and to the characteristic tensions of diasporic
subjectivity.4
In La Dissmination Derrida describes dissemination as limpossible
retour lunit rejointe, rajointe dun sens, la marche barre dune telle
rflexion (Derrida, 1972: 299). This impossible return, the impossibility
even to think in terms of return, is precisely the diasporic state of the
Sartrean pour-soi, to which the prospect of self-coincidence is irrevocably
blocked. Derrida goes on to insist that dissemination has nothing to do with
a loss of meaning, which would imply that truth was once available; rather,
as he puts it (Derrida, 1972: 300), la dissmination affirme la gnration
toujours dj divise du sens. Dissemination, then, is not something that
happens to meaning like a hammer blow which shatters a vase; rather it is
the inaugural moment, the non-originary origin, out of which meaning is
produced. Without the spreading of the seed there is no generation; and
there is no opposition here between dissemination and proper meaning,
because the notion of proper meaning is precisely what dissemination
scatters to the wind. Moreover, this undercuts the temptation of nostalgia;
there is no truth, no self, no object of desire, no homeland, which were once
possessed and to which we can hope to return. Dissemination is where
meaning occurs, albeit in disarray; diaspora is where the subject finds itself,
albeit as fractured.
Dissemination and diasporic subjectivity are linked in that both record an
originary displacement, so that there is no proper site to which they can long
to return. Derrida himself does not make this link between diaspora and
dissemination; it is nevertheless implied by his account of his own experience
as a Jew of the Diaspora in Algeria. In Le Monolinguisme de lautre, Derrida
describes how the Algerian Jews had their French citizenship revoked during
the Second World War. They were thereby left literally stateless, isolated
both from the indigenous Arab communities and the white French colonials.
This sense of not-belonging-here-but-not-belonging-anywhere-else is the
state of diaspora when all nostalgia for a lost homeland is abandoned.
Language is bound up with the diasporic condition. Derrida was brought up
as French-speaking, without a native knowledge either of the Jewish
languages of the Diaspora or other languages current in Algeria, notably
Arabic or Berber; so French is his only language, but it is also not his. It is
the language of a colonial power which denied him citizenship, and which
therefore excluded him from owning the only language he knew well. This
originary loss of French is intensified in the experience of the Algerian Jews,
who according to Derrida are subject to a triple loss of language: they were
dispossessed of French, which could be a genuine mother tongue; Ladino
(Judeo-Spanish, the language of the Jews of Spanish origin) was no longer
practised; and Hebrew was not widely taught and understood (Derrida, 1996:

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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

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influential and controversial works of his late period, Spectres de Marx

(1993). It also looks back to his earlier work on phenomenology, as it
disturbs the status of the indispensable building block of phenomenology:
the phenomenon itself. The phenomenon, which should be that which is
most unquestionably available to experience, is haunted, shadowed, not
fully present because it does not coincide with itself any more than we can
fully possess it. At this point, despite everything that separates them,
Derrida rejoins Sartre. Sartrean phenomenology depicts a world of
apparitions in which the phenomenon is both nothing other than what it
appears to be and never fully present in its appearances; and the Sartrean
subject, described as hant par la prsence de ce avec quoi il devrait
concider pour tre soi (Sartre, 1943: 140), is also in the thrall of its
internalised ghosts.
Diaspora, then, can be taken as a figure for modern, spectral subjectivity,
homeless and self-haunted. Derrida is aware that his account of alienation
without alienation takes his own exceptional experience as exemplary; but
as Judith Still has pointed out (2004: 124), in this he is merely replicating
the standard move of autobiography: Exceptional and everyman of course
the classic autobiographical trope (Still, 2004: 124). Moreover, Derridas
hesitant embracing of autobiography and his anxious yet frequent use of the
first person, his lucid self-probing (Hiddleston, 2005: 303), can be related to
the more widespread philosophical return to the subject. This return,
though, is a return to something which is now discovered to be displaced.
The Cartesian foundation of knowledge on the subjects self-certainty has
been eroded, so that subjectivity is now a site where various forms of
bewilderment are played out. That this is not just a theoretical issue is
indicated by the epistemological anxieties which can be traced in popular
culture as much as in Derridean poststructuralism. The Matrix trilogy
provides a good example of such anxieties in recent film. Neo, the character
who may be the One to lead humanity out of computer simulation back into
an assured reality, is seen right at the beginning of the first Matrix film
carrying Baudrillards Simulacra and Simulation, as if the whole series were
conceived out of the drive to prove Baudrillard first right (there is only
simulation) and then wrong (we can re-conquer the real). The series may
point to the possibility of escaping from simulation and returning to the real
world in which we belong, but the cost of this may be too heavy to bear. It
entails a quasi-religious leap of faith which the films (perhaps inadvertently)
make laughably implausible, as if they were themselves willing to embrace
belief in a return to the real but in the end find themselves unable to pay the
price.
Another sign of such anxieties is the persistence of stories and films of the
supernatural. Here, it is as if the haunting of the subject described by Sartre
and Derrida were being literalised, again in a double gesture of
acknowledgement and repudiation. Such stories give ghosts existence

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FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 17(3)

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

not portrayed as embodiments of pure evil, of a simple drive to kill or

revenge, but as sufferers, pursuing their victims with an awkward
persistence, colored by a kind of infinite sadness (as in Werner Herzogs
Nosferatu, in which the vampire is not a simple machinery of evil with a

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DAVIS: DIASPORIC SUBJECTIVITIES

cynical smile on his lips, but a melancholic sufferer longing for

salvation).
v

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

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LHte, then, plays on the settled oppositions (home/exile, belonging/not

belonging, colonised/coloniser) that diasporic subjectivities fatally disturb.
Initially, the Arabs and the pieds noirs can be depicted as unified and
opposed groups; but both unity and opposition soon break down, as for
example in the exchange between Daru and the policeman Balducci:
Et [Daru] demanda, avant que le gendarme ait ouvert la bouche:
Il parle franais?
Non, pas un mot. On le recherchait depuis un mois, mais ils le
cachaient. Il a tu son cousin.
Il est contre nous?
Je ne crois pas. Mais on ne peut jamais savoir.
Pourquoi a-t-il tu?
Des affaires de famille, je crois. Lun devait du grain lautre,
parat-il. a nest pas clair. Enfin, bref, il a tu le cousin dun coup de
serpe. Tu sais, comme au mouton, zic! (Camus, 1957: 89)

The passage revolves around the existence of two groups separated by

language and race. Each group seeks to gain advantage over the other,
whatever the claims of legality or morality (On le recherchait depuis un
mois, mais ils le cachaient). Yet the groups are not internally unified: the
Arab has killed a cousin for [d]es affaires de famille. The murder is
committed not because the victim is alien or different, but precisely because
he is the murderers kin. The scission within the Arab group is subsequently
re-enacted within the group of colonisers, as Daru rejects Balduccis order
and offends him: Je vais taccompagner, dit Daru./ Non, dit Balducci. Ce
nest pas la peine dtre poli. Tu mas fait un affront (Camus, 1957: 91).
Balducci tells Daru that if there is an Arab uprising, nous sommes tous dans
le mme sac (90), but Daru behaves comme sil ne voulait pas tre dans le
mme sac (98). So each of the opposed groups is internally divided;
moreover, the opposition between the groups is itself uncertain, and indeed
even radically unknowable: Il est contre nous?/ Je ne crois pas. Mais on
ne peut jamais savoir.
LHte describes the complex unities and disunities which arise through
the coexistence of separate cultures. It sketches at least the potential for
kinship across the racial and cultural divide. Camusian humanism entertains
the possibility of a shared humanity rediscovered in privileged moments of
bonding, such as when Rieux and Tarrou take an evening swim together in
La Peste. Daru both experiences and resists this sense of bonding when he
shares his bedroom with the sleeping Arab:
Dans la chambre o, depuis un an, il dormait seul, cette prsence le
gnait. Mais elle le gnait aussi parce quelle lui imposait une sorte de

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fraternit quil refusait dans les circonstances prsentes et quil

connaissait bien: les hommes, qui partagent les mmes chambres, soldats
ou prisonniers, contractent un lien trange comme si, leurs armures
quittes avec les vtements, ils se rejoignaient chaque soir, par-dessus
leurs diffrences, dans la vieille communaut du songe et de la fatigue.
Mais Daru se secouait, il naimait pas ces btises, il fallait dormir.
(Camus, 1957: 96)

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.

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Diasporic subjectivity entails an openness to dissemination so that the

very terms which might be used to characterise it (presence, being, selfhood,
exile, nostalgia, return, belonging and alienation, even life and death) are at
risk of being drained of their recognisable senses. The diasporic subject is a
ghost, whose residence is never assured, who does not belong here or
elsewhere, and whose possibility of encounter is vouchsafed by a constitutive
incompletion. Ethically, this entails an availability and debt to the Other;
politically, if the meaning of belonging is questioned, then it gets harder to
say who is an incomer and who a native, who should be allowed to stay and
who should be forced to leave. In this respect, LHte exemplifies and
enacts Camuss difficulty in taking sides over the Algerian conflict. When
Daru is no less Algerian, no more or less the host or the guest in this
ownerless earth, the choice between expelling him and letting him remain
becomes unmakeable. There is no other home to which he can return. The
drama of the story is that his diasporic subjectivity is in a deadly face-off
with nascent revolutionary forces seeking nationhood, and with it the power
to decide who does and who does not belong. The ethical experiment of
LHte, opening up a space where otherness may be encountered, is also
what constitutes its political failure: it can imagine no political solution
aside from the utopian hope for a rediscovered, renewed, non-violent,
inclusive fraternity.
The displaced subject of Sartre or Derrida, the ghosts and zombies of
recent films, and Daru in Camuss story are all in some sense diasporic
creatures. As such, the urgency which speaks through them is not to restore
or return to a former state, but rather a forwards drive which disturbs,
deranges and disseminates the settled knowledge from which they set out.
To adapt terms used frequently by Levinas, the diasporic subject is not
Odysseus, whose point of departure is also the homeland of Ithaca to which
he longs to return; rather, it is Abraham, who obeys a call that comes from
nowhere instructing him to set out on a journey into the land of the Other
without hope of return. Diaspora names a scattering, an impossible selfcoincidence, a dispersion without source, an exile without homeland, and
an appalling entanglement of the living and the dead. The subject is
diasporic in part because it traverses the anguish of never achieving selfcoincidence; but this anguish is also the condition by which it seeks and
discovers the new, and in which it comes to know the exquisite pain of
encounter, loss and desire.
Notes
1. On post-theory, see in particular McQuillan et al. (1999), and for discussion, Davis, After
Poststructuralism (2004).
2. The following discussion draws substantially on Howells, Conclusion: Sartre and the
Deconstruction of the Subject (Howells, 1992).

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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).

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v

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Colin Davis is Professor of French at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Address for correspondence: School of Modern Languages, Literatures and
Cultures, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX,
UK [email: colin.davis@ rhul.ac.uk]

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