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Lyotard’s Algeria: Experiments

in Theory
JANE HIDDLESTON

Abstract:
This article explores the changing position of Lyotard’s writing on Algeria
within his corpus. The essays gathered together in La Guerre des Algériens: Ecrits
1956–63 (The Algerians’ War: Texts 1956–63), and published much later in
1989, are certainly among his most overtly politically engaged. These pieces
track the progress of the War of Independence from the early signs of unrest
in 1952 to what Lyotard perceives as the divisive effects of FLN ideology
in the aftermath of independence, and the collection as a whole underlines
not only the conflict between coloniser and colonised but also that between
the rural masses and the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, despite his commitment
to Algerian independence at the time of writing, Lyotard later lamented the
failings of these essays. He also alters his stance on his own use of Marxism,
and condemns his attempts to offer a Marxist revolutionary critique. He
then chose to republish the work in 1989, yet this volte-face testifies to the
author’s ongoing ambivalence towards his own writing on decolonization. At
one moment, Lyotard mocks and undermines his own efforts to understand
and systematize the mechanics of the liberation movement. Yet he then goes
on to suggest that the Algerian conflict exemplifies his later concept of the
‘differend’. This unease both within and towards the volume La Guerre des
Algériens will be the focus of this article. The essays’ eclecticism, and Lyotard’s
own altering response to them, can be understood as an early testimony to
an increasing scepticism towards Marxism in French critical thought, and, at
the same time, towards what Lyotard conceived as dogmatic ‘theory’, in the
context of decolonization in Algeria.

Keywords: Lyotard, Algeria, Algerian War of Independence, theory, anxiety

Lyotard’s writing on Algeria occupies a problematic and uneasy


position in his corpus. Lyotard spent two years teaching in Constantine
between 1950 and 1952, and went on to produce a series of essays for
the Socialisme ou barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism) collective from 1956
to 1963, and these texts are certainly his most militant and engaged.
Starting with discussion of the build-up to the Algerian revolution
Paragraph 33:1 (2010) 52–69
DOI: 10.3366/E0264833409000741
Lyotard’s Algeria: Experiments in Theory 53
in 1952, and finishing with an acerbic lament at the contradictions
plaguing the immediate aftermath of independence, the articles offer
a (changing) Marxist perspective on the movement and analyse the
tensions within it between the rural masses and the bourgeoisie.
Lyotard pronounces lucidly on his dissatisfaction with the dilemmas
and inequalities of the emergent nation, and points out at the same
time the difficulties associated with the attempt to express French
left-wing support. Nevertheless, despite his commitment to the cause
at the time of writing, Lyotard later turned against the work and
drew attention to its delusions and insufficiencies. In Postmodern
Condition, he implicitly bemoans the essays’ theoretical confusion, and
in Peregrinations, he openly admits that the contradictions following
Algeria’s liberation would never be surmounted by the Marxist
dialectic promoted by Socialisme ou barbarie. More extravagantly, in
Libidinal Economy Lyotard celebrates the divergent libidinal drives of
resistant Algerians, rejects the dryness of his previous Marxist stance
and argues that the multiplicity of affects shaping the uprising ‘cannot
give rise to a sociological reading or an unequivocal politics’.1 It is
perhaps somewhat surprising, then, that Lyotard chose to republish
the essays in the form of the collection La Guerre des Algériens:
Ecrits 1956–63 (The Algerians’ War: Texts 1956–63) in 1989, and it
seems that he himself is highly ambivalent towards his own writing
on decolonization. On the one hand, the endeavour to grasp and
systematize the details of the liberation movement is subsequently
mocked and denigrated for its reductive effects, and even more,
‘theory’ itself is condemned as stultifying. On the other hand, this
condemnation is on some level tempered by the essays’ rehabilitation
and reframing in 1989. This vacillation testifies to an anxiety in
Lyotard’s anti-colonial theory that will form the focus of this article.
Lyotard’s later ambivalence towards the Algerian essays is just one
indication of the slippery nature of the collection. The essays’ own
eclecticism can also be understood as an early testimony to the
weakening both of Marxism in French critical thought, and, more
broadly, of what Lyotard conceived as systematic, dogmatic ‘theory’,
in the context of decolonization in Algeria. If thinkers such as Sartre
and Fanon drew extensively on Marxist theory in their writing on
the Algerian conflict, Lyotard exposes the difficulties of the Marxist
model while demonstrating that such synthetic forms of theory
more generally can no longer account for the intricacies of anti-
colonial critique.2 Lyotard’s commentary on the Algerian problem
is illuminating and yet bungled, analytical and yet self-contradictory,
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and he struggles to produce a coherent theoretical stance. The essays
are uneasy with their own Marxist language, the collection wavers
in its evaluation of nationalism, and adopts a framework of class
analysis while also stressing that the fight for independence transcends
class struggle. Furthermore, when read in conjunction with Lyotard’s
later writing, the essays can be seen to anticipate at once distinct
and related theoretical idioms. This article will read the Algerian
texts in order to display both their internal uncertainties, and their
ambivalent development in the rest of his work: their rebuttal and
eventual, uncanny return. Texts such as The Postmodern Condition
and The Differend both on some level follow on from the Algerian
essays while reinventing their language almost beyond recognition.
Conceived as successors to the Algerian works, these subsequent pieces
reveal the original investigation to be focused less on the mechanics of
decolonization than on the difficulty of finding a language for the
conceptualization of a new form of nationhood after independence.
Conversely, if understood as part of a new strand in his thought
working against that of the Socialisme ou barbarie period, they serve
to uncover that former idiom’s discursive deficiencies. The position of
that early work within Lyotard’s corpus remains highly uncertain, and
moreover, this testifies to a continuing uneasiness with regard to the
form of theory necessary for anti- or postcolonial critique.

La Guerre des Algériens: an ambivalent nationalism


One of the principal strands of the essays gathered in La Guerre des
Algériens is a polemical call for the invention of a new, unified nation,
despite an awareness of the delusions of that call. First, this means
that Lyotard urges the withdrawal of the French colonial presence
and the formation of a new Algeria entirely free and distinct from
any potentially lingering French influence or allegiance. In stark,
persuasive and militant terms, he asserts: ‘we are unconditionally
against all imperialisms, including French imperialism. We are
unconditionally hostile to the pursuit of terror’.3 The polemic in
favour of decolonization, however, also at times slips into a celebration
of Algerian national unity, and this is a slippage that persists in making
its author uneasy throughout the collection. Early in the war, Lyotard
affirms that one of his interests in the independence movement lies in
the question: ‘why the national-democratic objective of independence
constituted, and still constitutes in part, a platform able to gather
Lyotard’s Algeria: Experiments in Theory 55
together all the ‘popular’ forces from the middle-bourgeoisie to the
agricultural sub-proletariat’ (GA, 41). In response to the general strike
of 1957, Lyotard again begins his analysis by noting that the movement
expressed ‘the massive adherence of different Muslim urban classes to
the national idea’ (GA, 68); and he notes that the problem with the
deployment of repressive forces was that it revealed only the alienation
of those forces from social reality. At the same time, the strike showed
how the FLN had penetrated both the ranks of bourgeois businessmen
and the working classes, and had succeeded in involving both groups
in what had largely been up until then a movement led by peasants.
In ‘Mise à nu des contradictions algériennes’ (Laying Bare Algerian
Contradictions), Lyotard also notes how the colonial society buried
class antagonisms, with the result that the FLN was on some level
able to unify the Algerian people in their support for independence
despite internal differences: ‘the ideology that animates them, even if
in the end it is composite, is experienced as a unanimous response to
a situation that is felt in a unanimous way by all Algerians’ (GA, 90).
The struggle, according to Lyotard, required a belief in a new, unified
and ideologically distinct nation.
Nevertheless, the nationalist drive in Lyotard’s work gradually
weakens. Partha Chatterjee has analysed the ironies of postcolonial
nationalism by arguing that the very concept of the nation is a
European one, frequently ill suited to the heterogeneous communities
of the postcolonial world, and Lyotard’s analysis of Algeria offers insight
into one example of a misguided notion of national unity.4 Even in one
of the earliest essays, ‘La Situation en Afrique du Nord’ (The Situation
in North Africa), Lyotard’s otherwise confident polemic finishes with
the warning that the bourgeoisie may be unable to divide the land in
a way that would please the peasantry. He goes on to add that in any
case they are likely to need investments from America or the Soviet
Union. The unity of the independent nation, even as forecast in 1956,
is under threat: ‘in such conditions, we can foresee only a development
of conflicts, conflicts between privileged fractions who echo greedy
imperialisms; conflicts between the new masters and the exploited
people, in which all those who are not satisfied with the dominant
politics will participate’ (GA, 50). Nationalist unity is essential to the
resistance movement, then, yet it already masks class differences and
internal inequalities. Later, in ‘Le Contenu social de la lutte algérienne’
(The Social Content of the Algerian Struggle), Lyotard goes on to
observe that in reality the Algerian bourgeoisie has not so far played a
decisive role in the struggle, and that there is no social group ready to
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take over as leaders of the new independent nation. Again, he predicts
fragmentation and dissension between Algerians, and criticizes the
very nationalist unity that he also wants to recommend. Lyotard makes
the claim that nationalist ideology requires ‘a universal formulation
and common objectives’ if it is grow and thrive, and yet the attacks
that began in November 1954 and that continued to multiply cover
both ‘a political void’ and ‘a social void’ (GA, 147, 148). The FLN is
based neither on a pre-existing coherent nationalist agenda, nor on a
unified social class claiming a nationalist role.
It is with the final essay of this collection, ‘L’Algérie évacuée’
(Algeria Evacuated), that Lyotard’s nationalist drive collapses most
definitively. Recording the situation immediately following Algerian
independence, Lyotard describes the breakdown of the new nation
and the collapse of political unity: ‘we expected a revolution; we had
a country in melt-down [en panne]. In the political void that was
established with independence, the leadership of the FLN exploded
into pieces’ (GA, 236). During the struggle, the FLN had managed
to create the merest ‘embryo of a State’, and the war had left the
countryside decimated (GA, 238). Local leaders found themselves
unable to cope with conflicting demands from those affected, yet
responded by seizing more authority and competing with each other.
At the same time, the differences within the massive peasantry, the
varying conditions and needs of divergent types of workers, became
increasingly manifest in the absence of persistent, long-term traditions.
At the political level too, Lyotard comments that Ben Bella pointed
out the gap between the FLN leaders and the masses, and called
for increased attention to the people against the ‘barons’ and petit-
bourgeois opportunists. Nevertheless, those who had signed the Evian
agreement rejected Ben Bella’s proposals and tactics, though again,
those who joined with this rebuttal had little consensus among
themselves. The rural masses who suffered most from the destruction
of the war were also in turn divided in their understanding of the
region’s future, and a general sense of unrest persisted in the absence
of a coherent political or social vision. As a result, Lyotard asserts, ‘this
is the great paradox of the Algerian revolution: a profoundly fractured
rural society sets itself against its own crisis and nevertheless does not
produce ideas or acts capable of surmounting it’ (GA, 258). As James
Mowitt has pointed out, Lyotard positions himself a long way from
Fanon’s optimistic vision of the Algerian nation promised in A Dying
Colonialism, and concludes on the contrary by uncovering the conflicts
interrupting the creation of a harmonious nation-state.5 Although
Lyotard’s Algeria: Experiments in Theory 57
Fanon warned against the pitfalls of a bourgeois domination of the
new national consciousness in ‘Pitfalls of National Consciousness’, his
essays on national culture and on the role of the Algerian national
radio in unifying the people serve as a moving call for solidarity and
political action.6 Lyotard’s doubtful comments on Algerian nationalism
are rather less polemical and celebratory.
Lyotard no doubt sought deliberately to point out the paradoxical
status of notions of national unity during the independence movement.
What at times seems unclear, however, is the extent to which he
intends to recommend nationalist unity, and more particularly, the role
that he conceives for the bourgeoisie in its creation. Concerning the
latter, the text of ‘L’Algérie évacuée’ ends with the pronouncement
that no further uprising can solve Algeria’s problems, ‘as long as a
social class, or a well organised and established section of society, does
not construct and will not succeed in getting everyone to accept a
model of new relations’ (GA, 282). It would appear, then, that Lyotard
believes at this point that a coherent class of leaders is needed to
reunite Algerian society into a new model of nationhood. Frequently,
however, his critique of the disengaged bourgeoisie appears so acerbic
that one suspects that he might indeed remain dissatisfied with any
ruling class and its potential segregation from those it seeks to govern.
He writes against the separation of society into distinct classes, and
yet also suggests that a strong and coherent bourgeoisie would solve
many of Algeria’s problems. More broadly, nationalist unity might have
been necessary, in Lyotard’s view, for the success of the independence
movement, and yet his description of real differences in outlook
between diverse factions of the newly independent Algerian society
suggests that any such unity would turn out to be either superficial or
tyrannical. Nationalist unity is both championed and questioned here,
and Lyotard seems unsure whether its fragility should be cured by the
imposition of a coherent set of uniform policies, or by the dominance
of a single party, or not.
This unease concerning the role of national unity and of the
nationalist bourgeoisie is related to a somewhat ambivalent treatment
of Marxism, and it is noteworthy in this context that critics interpret
Lyotard’s investment in Marx in contrasting ways. On the one hand,
James Williams reads the essays as Marxist, and argues that the works
explore the development of Marx in the context of the Algerian
struggle.7 In his more detailed study of Lyotard’s political writings,
Williams equally characterizes the Algerian works as ‘a theory about
economic and social contradictions and how to resolve them’ and
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argues that Lyotard at this stage still believes in the possibility of
a people’s revolution.8 For Williams it is in the later work on the
differend that this belief in progress falters. Conversely, Stuart Sim
detects Lyotard’s discomfort with Marxism from the earliest essays.
Lyotard implies that notions of the ‘Algerian people’ or of a unified
‘proletariat’ are unworkable in the Algerian conflict, and he seems
uneasy about whether the revolution should be conceived as a ‘class
struggle’. Sim suggests that for Lyotard, a Marxist interpretation of
the war of independence ignores Algerian realities, ‘treating it as a
latter-day equivalent of the Russian Revolution’.9 Indeed, for Sim the
essays on Algeria are what led Lyotard to reject Marxism altogether for
its excessive dogmatism and inability to cope with the multifaceted
tensions of the Algerian situation: ‘frustration at such theoretical
inflexibility and rigidity of thought is gradually pushing Lyotard
into proto-postmodern positions’ (3). As a result, for Sim unlike for
Williams the Algerian essays feed directly into the later work. The
possible validity of both interpretations suggests that Lyotard himself
both wanted to use a Marxist framework, and to stretch and eventually
reject it. Lyotard’s ambivalence towards the possibility of unifying the
Algerian people and towards the nationalist bourgeoisie is part of this
changing attitude towards the framework of Marxist revolution.
Lyotard was later conscious of his obfuscations in this work, and
went on to reject the theoretical confusion of his militant stance.
It is, however, significant that he decided eventually to publish the
collection in 1989 despite its deficiencies, prefaced by a further analysis
of the aims and approach of the articles. ‘Le Nom d’Algérie’ (The
Name of Algeria) introduces the essays in the context of Socialisme
ou barbarie and figures them in terms that, while still sympathetic,
reconfigure both their genre and their desired effect. The preface
explains that the stakes of the Socialisme ou barbarie approach was the
call for attention to the intraitable (the intractable) — a term that is
more abstract than those used in the essays themselves. The difficulty
is no longer that of making a coherent nationalist policy out of diverse
contributing factions, but that of tending to the inaccessible at the
heart of that chaos. Lyotard now understands his earlier confusion as
an awareness that ‘ “the intractable” is derived, and remains lodged, at
the most secret centre of everything that is ordered into a system’, and
he implies that the role of his work was to celebrate the inventiveness
and creativity of that resistance to systemization (GA, 35). This in
turn would for Lyotard give rise to a spontaneous, potentially anarchist
form of political critique, so that ‘the “Socialism or Barbarism” group
Lyotard’s Algeria: Experiments in Theory 59
denoted, I think, the secret from which all resistance derives its
energy’ (GA, 35). If he moves away from his earlier Marxist stance
then, he still declares a theoretical continuity with the approach
of Socialisme ou barbarie even at the time of writing, in the sense
that he remains committed to the conceptual ambivalences of the
intraitable. In addition, Lyotard now claims that his simultaneous
support for Algerian independence and critique of the class society
to which it led is a ‘differend’ — not so much the result of any
confusion or inconsistency as a conflict that is both necessary and
inevitable. This reading is also developed by Mohammed Ramdani in
his introduction to La Guerre des Algériens, ‘L’Algérie, un différend’
(Algeria, a Differend). The notion of the differend implies not so
much a failure of understanding as an indication of the impossibility
of any grand narrative, including that of Marxism. In this retrospective
re-evaluation of the Algerian work, Lyotard in this way reaffirms its
informative capacities, not so much for its diagnoses but rather for its
demonstration of a need for theoretical openness.
Lyotard clearly found the ideological vocabulary and the analytical
tone of his early theory reductive, as well as open to criticisms of
conceptual muddling. The essays on Algeria continue to play a role
in his thought, though, less because of their concrete insights than
because of their exposition of the flaws and distortions created by
the imposition of a systematized theory (such as that of Marxism or
nationalism). In addition, Lyotard resuscitates them not because they
provide a clear account of the revolution, but because, according to
his present reworking, they do, whatever their shortcomings, contain
something of his affect for Constantine. Beneath the theoretical
dryness, Lyotard now claims that the essays contain the traces of
‘a love letter’, in which ‘he confesses his jealousy for everything that
deceives and will deceive the loved one’ (GA, 21). The work’s apparent
attempts to systematize the Algerian situation turn out all along to have
been underpinned by a subjective, even emotive drive, much more
in accordance with his later demands for the insertion of affect into
theory.
Whether or not this romantic imagery is an appropriate description
of the essays remains open to question. It is clear that on some
level Lyotard is rewriting and indeed sentimentalizing his initial
endeavours. This discovery of affect in the writing on Algeria is
explored by Suzanne Gearhart, who traces emotions of humiliation,
fear and solidarity, and argues that these show up the limitations
of certain political, historical and ethnographical theories.10 Yet the
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essays, together with the new preface, can be read perhaps not as
love-letters but certainly as experiments in theoretical analysis and as
expositions of inevitable theoretical aporias. In their developments and
volte-faces, they perform the galloping thought processes of an acute
intellect battling with an impossibly complex sequence of events, and
the necessary deferral of his attempts at conclusion. They testify to
a weakening of any doctrinal Marxist theory, and indeed, foreshadow
something of the defeat of militant intellectual criticism in France after
May 1968. They also reveal the uneasy relation between nationalism
and class struggle, as Lyotard both upholds and vilifies the nationalist
bourgeoisie. The texts in this way display the desire of the theorist
to know and understand, together with his drive to locate a solution
and a cause for future hope, but they also, provocatively, exhibit the
impossibility of satisfying that desire.11

An uncanny theoretical continuity?


In describing the goal of Socialisme ou barbarie as a call for attention to
the ‘differend’ and the ‘intractable’, Lyotard clearly demonstrates some
level of theoretical continuity with later works. The most obvious
connection is of course with The Differend, in which Lyotard writes
less of the concrete conditions of struggle than of an aporia between
discourses, between languages or ‘phrase regimens’. Strictly defined,
the differend names ‘a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties,
that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement
applicable to both arguments’.12 This resistance to resolution lies not so
much in the content of the dispute, but in the incompatibility between
the discursive practices of each side. One party suffers from the impasse
of the differend when its idiom turns out to be untranslatable to
that of the opposing party, and when the judgement or resolution
of the difficulty is carried out in the language of the other. One of
Lyotard’s examples is that of the worker trying to convince the capitalist
employer that his hours of labour are not objects of commerce, when
the employer only conceives his workforce in terms of the market.
The parties in such a case are operating according to incompatible
conceptions of work, and the worker’s understanding of his essence
and role are irreducible to the language of capitalist production. The
differend names the instant of silencing, the blockage hindering a
victim’s ability to put something into words, and the slippage of his
argument outside the discourse of litigation.
Lyotard’s Algeria: Experiments in Theory 61
To return to the Algerian context, Lyotard claims in retrospect
that there is a differend blocking the relation between the need to
support the Algerian demand for independence and the necessity to
criticize the class society to which it gave rise: ‘it is just, we said,
that Algerians press on the world that their name be proclaimed; it
is crucial to criticize the class structure of the independent society that
their combat prepares’ (GA, 36). Here, then, though the definition of
this tension as a differend is no doubt an overstatement, in that the
positions are not necessarily in themselves mutually exclusive, Lyotard
is perhaps suggesting that he is aware of his ambivalence towards the
nationalist bourgeoisie in the earlier essays. Now, though, Lyotard no
longer allows that ambivalence to lead to confusion, but uses it to
show that his analysis was open to different systems of argument or
‘phrase regimens’, and that, in addressing both issues, he was allowing
both positions to prove themselves. In declaring an awareness of the
differend in his own writing, Lyotard demonstrates that he refused to
submit to the authority of a single language game and resisted making
facile links in his argumentation. Equally, though he does not use the
term ‘differend’ in the original essays, the observation that ‘it is not
possible to negotiate in Algeria because “it is France” ’ suggests that
the relation between the French and the revolutionary Algerians was
precisely blocked by a differend, since the question that Algeria might
not be a part of France was excluded from the French argumentation
(GA, 48). Lyotard goes on to qualify his statement further by recalling
also that ‘in Algeria there are no valid interlocutors, that is, no local
bourgeois immediately capable of giving arms to the maquis, as in
Tunisia, and of somehow or other turning the peasant and proletarian
forces away from the division of the land’ (GA, 48). This implies again
that the difficulty and injustice of the conflict lay in the problem
that there was no strong bourgeois community to lead the struggle,
to manage it practically and organize the diffuse working classes in
such a way as to produce a coherent negotiating position. Diagnosis of
this differend shows how Lyotard is opening his analysis to dialogues
that were foreclosed, and to the ‘intractable’ that lingered between the
lines of the stand-off between France and Algeria as well as between
the bourgeoisie and the peasants. His account does not set out to
privilege one argument or position over the other, but signals the gaps
and inconsistencies in the processes of argumentation used and the
difficulty of creating a systematized theory of the Algerian conflict.
In reading La Guerre des Algériens in the light of The Differend,
however, it is important to stress that the later work also calls for a
62 Paragraph
new understanding of the position of the theorist and of the genre
of theoretical writing only incidentally present in the former work.
In The Differend, Lyotard emphasizes that the philosophical analysis of
the differend must be self-reflexive and conscious of its own system
of argumentation. Even more, ‘it denies the possibility of settling, on
the basis of its own rules, the differends it examines’ (contrary to the
speculative genre, for instance, or the analytic’ (D, xiv). The exegesis
must not be judgemental or value-driven. In addition, the author,
signalled by an anonymous A, must surrender any desire to interpret,
embellish or re-narrate the situations analysed: ‘the A’s naive ideal is
to attain a zero degree style and for the reader to have the thought in
hand, as it were’ (D, 13). The role of Lyotard’s theoretical persona
is precisely to focus not on the location of judgement but on the
exploration of silences. His analysis is to be linguistic and not juridical,
it is aesthetic rather than politically angled. The heterogeneous and
playful form of The Differend further helps to achieve this stance
of theoretical experimentation, as the insertion of comments from
a potential interlocutor implies, again, at least on a formal level,
an openness to dissent. The lengthy insertions, for example on the
paradox of existence according to Gorgias, also signal the opening out
of the theoretical agenda to additional nuance — such as the difficulty
of proving existence — as well as to more concrete dilemmas in the
construction of legal proof. On a larger scale, the terms that make up
the pithy statements of the first chapter ‘The Differend’ (‘the referent’,
‘the name’, ‘the genre’, etc.) are in turn expanded and problematized
further in the following sections.
This open-ended mode of writing both is and is not present in
the essays of La Guerre des Algériens. Certainly, the identification of
conflicting strands and incompatible arguments suggests that Lyotard’s
Algerian essays are not governed by a single over-riding policy, and at
no point does he suggest that one position can or ought to subsume
and determine the terms of another. The theorist’s drifting from
one argumentative framework to another, from that of nationalism to
that of class struggle, also implies an openness to different discourses
or language games. Equally, John Rachjman argues that the period
of engagement with Socialisme ou barbarie was also ‘a questioning of
that activity which would take him on what, using a term dear
to the Situationists, he would call a dérive (“swirl” or “drift”)’.13
James Williams also suggests both that the final essay, ‘L’Algérie
évacuée’, appeals to a more complex, fluid, emotionally driven reality,
and that Ramdani’s and Lyotard’s respective reframings of the essays
Lyotard’s Algeria: Experiments in Theory 63
bring out their aesthetic and literary qualities while problematizing
the creation of a coherent revolutionary politics.14 This notion of
drift, developed in Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud (Drift away from
Marx and Freud), lies far from the neutrality apparently sought in
The Differend, since it explores the intensities, affects and drives of
thought rather than attempting to eradicate the excess of interpretation
or linguistic distortion. Both techniques, however, express a resistance
to generalized forms of judgement, to over-arching systems of
argument and both at times inform the wayward structures of La Guerre
des Algériens. Indeed, the sense that these essays contain both a neutral
identification of differends and leaps of logic, and a more affective
drifting between temporarily appealing positions, in itself contributes
to my reading of the articles as theoretically experimental and unstable.
At the same time, however, there can be no doubt that, despite
Lyotard’s reinterpretation of the essays with the publication of the
collection in 1989, the texts do not always read as self-consciously
open-ended in the way that he might have later hoped. The later essay,
together with Ramdani’s introduction, is a rewriting and an enhanced
theorization of what the essays’ rather less authoritative author
probably did not quite perceive at the time. Lyotard’s contradictory
attitudes towards the importance of nationalist unity and the usefulness
of Marxism are not in the essays themselves explained in terms of a
necessary aporia, but seem rather more uncontrolled in their changing
formulations. One might even say that the theoretical confusion comes
from the attempt to reconcile within the same analysis two broader
‘phrase regimens’ — that of nationalism and that of class struggle —
and that it is the author’s drive to combine both endeavours that leads
to instabilities in his arguments. He may often be quite conscious of
the duality of the obligation he recommends, but still argues for the
combination of a nationalist ideology, driven by the bourgeois, with
attention to class tensions in a way that seems impossible in practice.
Moreover, if there is some affect or dérive in the writing, embellished
by the love letter analogy quoted earlier, this is also a tone that is
excluded from much of the analysis, which remains apparently for the
most part historical and quasi-objective. This stance claiming clarity
continues to mask specific partisan ideas and even passions, however,
and seems to do so unknowingly, given the urgency of the author’s
wavering demands.
If, then, La Guerre des Algériens can be read as a precursor to
The Differend, both in terms of its argument and in terms of its
theoretical strategy, such a reading is only partially convincing. The
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Algerian essays are more provocative and more subtle than they
might seem, in the sense that they exhibit the difficulties of taking
a straightforward stand on the nationalist problem and force us to
consider the persistence of incompatible lines of argument. Having said
this, it is possible also to conceive the essays as intermittently dogmatic,
and frequently caught up in their own theoretical entanglements. They
both anticipate the acuity of the linguistic analyses in The Differend,
and fall into forms of polemic that unwittingly undermine themselves
as they encounter alternative frameworks or language games. On the
situation in Algeria, they reveal the complexity of the independence
movement and of the role of Marxism in its construction, rather
than the veracity or appropriateness of the solutions that the author
nevertheless recommends. On the question of theoretical practice,
they expose the difficulties of applying a unified theory, such as
that of Marxism, to an endlessly complex anti-colonial conflict,
rather than proposing an assertive framework for a revolutionary
politics.
While Le Différend is the most obvious and most explicit successor
to Lyotard’s Algerian essays, The Postmodern Condition also expands and
reformulates some of the earlier work’s conclusions. Lyotard does not
overtly link La Guerre des Algériens with The Postmodern Condition,
but certain propositions at the heart of The Postmodern Condition
nevertheless build on the Algerian experience, despite their rejection
of a certain type of systematic theoretical description lingering in
Lyotard’s earlier exercise. First, Lyotard identifies the necessity for a
questioning of the sovereign power of the nation-state. Taking as his
starting-point the end of the 1950s, which is also the period of the
Algerian conflict, Lyotard observes that the production of knowledge
has become one of the tools by which hegemonic nations spread
their power. As the colonial period nears its close, (former) colonizing
nations shape and promulgate global structures of knowledge: ‘it is
conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of
information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory,
and afterwards for control of access to the exploitation of raw materials
and cheap labour’.15 At the same time, however, the commercialization
of knowledge, together with communication technology, transcends
the power of the nation-state and manifests both its potential to act
as an obstacle, and its limited control of the dissemination process.
Lyotard bears witness as a result both to a reinforcement in the power
of certain nation-states, and to the germination of global structures
that reach beyond them. One might as a result surmise on the one
Lyotard’s Algeria: Experiments in Theory 65
hand that, if dominant nation-states increase and promulgate their
power through the dissemination of knowledge, then the Algerians’
diffuse and incoherent nationalism is also what Lyotard perceives as the
source of their weakness. The liberation of Algeria for Lyotard also
involved not just the return of political power to the nation but the
construction of new national forms of knowledge entirely independent
of those imposed by France and French culture. On the other hand,
the plurality of the emergent Algerian nation exemplifies the limited
power of the colonial state.
Lyotard’s initial critique of the nation-state in the postcolonial era
quickly develops in the text into a reflection on the structuration of
knowledge as narrative. Narratives rely on the fulfilment of certain
rules in order to be understood, and these bind together and shape
the knowledge and culture of the community that adheres to them.
Western societies consequently conceive certain types of knowledge as
legitimate if they conform to their expectations of narrative structure,
and these in turn prop up a myth of social unity: ‘they thus define
what has the right to be said and done in the culture in question, and
since they are themselves a part of that culture, they are legitimated by
the simple fact that they do what they do’ (PC, 23). In contemporary
society, however, the grand narratives of knowledge of the nineteenth
century have lost their credibility. Smaller narratives are now seen
to operate according to distinct language games, which are unable
to legitimate those of other fields. While nation-states continue
to propagate dominant ‘narratives of knowledge’, then, these are
juxtaposed now with a proliferation of singular narratives and idioms
that refuse to conform to the rules of legitimization promoted by the
state. This conception of narrative profusion, variety and even discord
again brings us close to the tensions of Lyotard’s Algerians and the
diverse factions subtending the broader nationalist narrative. Indeed,
the dissolute masses and dispersed bourgeoisie of Lyotard’s Algeria can
be seen as one of his first expressions of doubt about the possibility of
unified national consensus.
Once again, however, the connection between La Guerre des
Algériens and The Postmodern Condition is not straightforward.
When James Mowitt pronounces that ‘Lyotard’s recognition of the
subordination of political experience to a general postcolonial diffusion
and internal differentiation of struggles is demonstrably the very
germ of his theory of the postmodern condition’, his statement
is somewhat one-sided (182). First, in The Postmodern Condition
the observation that the production of knowledge has been for some
66 Paragraph
time, and to a certain extent still is, controlled and legitimated by the
nation-state reads as a coherent frame for the rest of the text’s
questioning and expansion. In La Guerre de Algériens, however,
Lyotard’s understanding of the power of the nationalist framework
appears more changeable and haphazard: it is a structure that is
eclectically both upheld and challenged. Furthermore, in La Guerre
des Algériens it is not clear that he recommends internal fragmentation
and cultural proliferation in Algeria, on the contrary, this diversity
is seen as problematic in the struggle for a new nation. But, in
The Postmodern Condition, the multiplication of ‘small narratives’ is
described in salutary terms. Of course, the context is different, since
in the earlier work the creation of the nation functioned as a force
of resistance to oppression, whilst in the latter the nation-state is the
dominant legitimizing force whose power can be healthily questioned
in favour of innovation and scientific independence. Nevertheless,
the conclusion that the Algerian essays evidently gave rise to the
recommendations of The Postmodern Condition masks this significant
shift in context and purpose.
Like The Differend, moreover, The Postmodern Condition promotes an
alternative mode of theoretical writing only intermittently present in
La Guerre des Algériens. In the introduction to The Postmodern Condition,
Lyotard stresses that he is a reporter, not an expert on his material, and
admits that he does not always know what he is talking about. He then
distinguishes the language games of the reporter and the philosopher,
and confesses that his theoretical voice uses games of both interrogation
and conclusion: ‘I combine them here with the result that neither
quite succeeds’ (PC, xxv). As Colin Davis observes, he is already
breaking his own rules about the incommensurability of language
games.16 Yet he does this perhaps in order to warn us that, if he does
conclude, his conclusions will necessarily be interrupted by further
questioning. This may appear to sit uncomfortably with his often
sweeping statements broadly defining postmodernism, but serves above
all to suggest that the reader treat such statements with some awareness
of their irony in the context of the author’s theoretical agenda.
Lyotard is parodying his own drive for theoretical systematization,
and in turn, further performing the scepticism he also promotes. The
theorist or rapporteur is not promulgating established knowledge, nor
is he proposing single-handedly a new school of thought. He must
necessarily offer only one of many potential narratives, and produce
not a holistic analysis but one derived from the thinker’s familiarity
with multiple existing strands of thought. The scientific stance of
Lyotard’s Algeria: Experiments in Theory 67
Lyotard’s theoretical reporter in this text is parodic, since the systematic
character of the analysis and the diagnostic certainty conflict blatantly
with the principles his theory seeks to uphold.
Unlike at the time of La Guerre des Algériens, then, theory is
now self-consciously ironic and experimental. If in the Algerian
essays Lyotard at least attempted to speak with a voice of objectivity,
now such claims for authority are lucidly and sardonically spurned.
Nevertheless, in a sense Lyotard never escapes the contradictions
perhaps most clearly manifested in the Algerian texts. His work is
overtly and unavoidably theoretical, and yet he persists in rejecting
the term even as his writing belongs resolutely to that genre. Much of
his more self-conscious theoretical analysis is parodic and knowingly
self-mocking in its apparent scientism and neutrality. Yet this self-
knowledge does not exempt Lyotard from the criticism that he is,
among theorists, one of the most guilty of what he denounces so
acerbically in others. Perhaps the most famous example of this self-
defeating circularity is neatly summarized by Thébaud’s observation
at the end of Just Gaming, after Lyotard’s impassioned call for the
dissociation of description from prescription, that ‘here you are talking
like the great prescriber himself ’.17 The implication is that despite his
self-consciousness, Lyotard’s own criticisms inevitably apply to his own
work, and it is not clear that he is able to maintain his stance of lucid
self-irony without repeating the mastery he ironizes.
Lyotard rejects his past errors only to witness their spectral return.
Pointing out the delusions of La Guerre des Algériens, he exhibits similar
formal and structural contradictions in his later work, even if by this
time he is far more self-conscious. If the political stance of the Algerian
essays is scorned but never entirely rejected, then at the same time,
the drive for knowledge and philosophical mastery is softened by
moments of irony but also not fully eradicated in the later works.
The traces of Lyotard’s early insights into the Algerian contradiction
leave their mark on his later theories of judgement and knowledge,
while at the same time, the traps associated with creating a systematic
theoretical argument crop up again, if only partially, here. Perhaps
the clearest symptom of this ongoing disquiet is the uncertain status
Lyotard accords to the earlier work, and the eclecticism of his rejection,
and later his revival, of the Algerian essays. These pieces ultimately
both initiate an unease towards theoretical unity that he is unable
fully to put behind him, and unsettle him, paradoxically, as a result
of the flaws and strengths that he simultaneously and disconcertingly
perceives in them.
68 Paragraph
The inconsistencies in Lyotard’s Algerian essays, and in his
subsequent comments relating to them, uncover an uncertainty
affecting French critical thought in its confrontation with anti-
and post-colonialism more generally. Lyotard’s botched application
of Marxist thinking to the Algerian problem demonstrates the
diminishing resonance of critical structures familiar to French
intellectuals of the 1950s and 60s, and foreshadows the defeat of
Marxism in France after the upheavals of 1968. Fanon may, similarly,
have drawn attention to the limits of Marxist thinking in the context
of decolonization, but Fanon’s affirmation of Algerian national unity
masks inequalities and fragilities that were to develop in the aftermath
of independence, and that are more immediately apparent in Lyotard’s
essays. Furthermore, Lyotard’s self-conscious and self-doubting writing
is just one example of a crisis of confidence that plagues many
poststructuralist thinkers tackling problems of postcolonialism, of
national identity and difference. Poststructuralist postcolonial theory
of the sort produced by Homi Bhabha or Gayatri Spivak, among
others, is plagued with anxiety concerning its practitioners’ position
and efficacy, and often comes littered with uneasy self-reflexive
commentary. Lyotard’s early confusion in relation to decolonization
in Algeria can, then, be seen to anticipate a larger uncertainty in
theoretical circles concerning the production of a postcolonial critique.
Lyotard’s Algerian work should perhaps be reread, then, not so
much because it provides the answers to our questions about the
independence movement in Algeria, but because it reminds us of the
difficulty of articulating a coherent theoretical idiom on questions of
decolonization, of postcolonial identity, and nation formation.

NOTES
1 Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, translated by Iain Hamilton Grant
(London: Continuum, 2004), 112.
2 See Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, translated by Azzedine
Haddour, Steve Brewer and Terry McWilliams (London: Routledge, 2001),
and Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance
Farrington (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967).
3 Jean-François Lyotard, La Guerre des Algériens: Ecrits 1956–1963 (Paris:
Galilée, 1989), 48 (henceforth GA). Translations from this text are my own.
4 See Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought in the Postcolonial World: A Derivative
Discourse (London: Zed Books, 1986).
Lyotard’s Algeria: Experiments in Theory 69
5 See James Mowitt, ‘Algerian Nation: Fanon’s Fetish’, Cultural Critique (1992),
165–86.
6 Frantz Fanon, ‘Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ and ‘On National Culture’
in The Wretched of the Earth. Also, see the essays in A Dying Colonialism,
translated by Haakon Chevalier (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970).
7 See James Williams, Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy (Cambridge:
Polity, 1998).
8 See James Williams, Lyotard and the Political (London: Routledge, 2000),19.
9 Stuart Sim, Jean-François Lyotard (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall, Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1996), 2.
10 See Suzanne Gearhart, ‘Kant in Algeria: Lyotard’s Philosophy of Affect and
La Guerre des Algériens’, Esprit Créateur 39:4 (1999), 101–11.
11 In their brief introduction to Lyotard’s political writings, Keith Crome and
James Williams go so far as to perceive the Algerian essays as paving the way
not only towards anxiety but towards a sort of political nihilism, since they
suggest that: ‘since society can be seen as a multiplicity of shifting wrongs and
claims, the political had to be flexible enough to respond to this variation,
rather than hide it under larger groupings better suited to party politics and
to revolutionary movements allied to new parties and forms of government.
The complex and changing variety of wrongs can never be rectified simply
through revolution, yet they still place a responsibility on us. What are we to
do?’ The Lyotard Reader and Guide, edited by Keith Crome and James Williams
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 171.
12 Jean-François Lyotard, Le Différend (Paris: Minuit, 1983), 9, The Differend:
phrases in dispute, translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xi (henceforth D).
13 John Rachjman, ‘Jean-François Lyotard’s Underground Aesthetics’, October
86 (1998), 3–18 (7).
14 James Williams, Lyotard and the Political, 11–12.
15 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1986), 5 (henceforth PC).
16 For a more detailed discussion of the problem of performativity in The
Postmodern Condition, see Colin Davis, After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories
and Theory (London: Routledge, 2004), 72–3.
17 Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, translated by
Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 100.
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