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Identity trouble: national bodies and French hospitality

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Identity trouble: national bodies and French hospitality

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IDENTITY TROUBLE:
NATIONAL BODIES AND FRENCH HOSPITALITY
by
Kristen Besinque

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE & CULTURE)

August 2021

Copyright 2021 Kristen Besinque

ii
Table of Contents

Abstract…………………………………………………………………. iii
Introduction : Crises…………………………………………………………………1

Chapter 1 : Who is French ? Nationality laws…………………………………………19

Chapter 2: Sang pour sang : Deconstructing National Bodies…………………………70

Chapter 3 : Faire de la place : The Borders of Hélène Cixous…………………………100

Chapter 4 : The rites of hospitality : Les Identitaires ……………………………………124

Conclusion : Immunologic…………………………………………………………..145
Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………..155

iii

Abstract

In contemporary France, there exists a tension between republican universalism and antiracism,
particularly in terms of the way in which identities are constructed. Part of the difficulty, or the
“trouble” that France has with identity has to do with its relationship to its former colonies and the
legislation of nationality. This dissertation explores the relationship between France and Algeria
through the question of citizenship, particularly with regards to its legal history from post-1945 to
the present day. Through an exploration of jus soli and jus sanguinis, this dissertation examines the
French relationship to blood and soil, from the scientific racism of the 1930s to the 2021 projet de loi
confortant le respet des principes de la République.
1
Introduction

Crises

L’indépendance de la France pour vivre mieux exige aussi notre unité autour de la
République… Je nous vois nous diviser pour tout, et parfois perdre le sens même de notre
histoire…Nous unir autour du patriotisme républicain est une nécessité… Nous sommes une
nation où chacun quelque soient ses origines, sa religion, doit trouver sa place. Est-ce vrai
partout et pour tout le monde ? Non. Notre combat doit se poursuivre, s’intensifier, pour
permettre d’obtenir les diplômes et emplois qui correspondent aux mérites et talents de
chacun, et lutter contre le fait que le nom, l’adresse, la couleur de peau, réduisent encore trop
souvent dans notre pays les chances que chacun doit avoir…
Nous serons intraitables face au racisme et à l’antisémitisme…Mais ce combat noble est
dévoyé lorsqu’il se transforme en communautarisme, en réécriture haineuse ou fausse du
passé. Ce combat noble est inacceptable lorsqu’il est récupéré par les séparatistes…
Je vous le dis très clairement ce soir… la République n’effacera aucune trace ni aucun nom de
son Histoire. Elle n’oubliera aucune de ses œuvres, ne déboulonnera pas de statue, nous
devons regarder ensemble toute notre histoire, notre rapport à l’Afrique...
Sans ordre républicain, il n’y a ni sécurité, ni liberté…
1

In contemporary France, there exists a tension between republican universalism and antiracism. Often
denounced as imported communautarisme, so-called “identity politics” are purported to be unsuited to
France, too “American” and thus, could not possibly resonate with the history or the people of the
French Republic. The universalist republican dream is France’s official policy: integration, its goal, and
communautarisme, its greatest threat. President Emmanuel Macron’s recent speech given on June 14
th
,
2020 to the French public, in which he addressed the COVID-19 “crise” and, at the same time, without

1
Official Elysée YouTube Channel, Allocution d’Emmanuel Macron, 14 juin 2020 “Adresse aux Français”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkYhDfVy1M0&feature=emb_title

2
having to name it, another crise: the recent Black Lives Matter and Adama Trouré protests denouncing
police brutality in Paris. Macron’s solution for making it through the “crisis” — l’ordre républicain.
Without having to name or say explicitly who or what he is referring to, Macron designates
“separatists” who will destabilize the nation through division. National order, which is to say national
security, can only be maintained if we stop talking (presumably about race, though he never says that
outright) and stop criticizing the police, who, according to Macron deserve our support because “ils
sont exposés à des risques quotidiens en notre nom” and are thus insuring that the “order” does not fall into
chaos:
L’indépendance de la France pour vivre mieux exige aussi notre unité autour de la République.
Tel est le deuxième axe de cette nouvelle étape. Je nous vois nous diviser pour tout et parfois
perdre le sens de notre Histoire. Nous unir autour du patriotisme républicain est une nécessité ́.
Nous sommes une Nation où chacun, quelles que soient ses origines, sa religion doit trouver sa
place. Est-ce vrai partout et pour tout le monde ? Non.
Notre combat doit donc se poursuivre, s’intensifier pour permettre d’obtenir les diplômes et les
emplois qui correspondent aux mérites et talents de chacun et lutter contre le fait que le nom,
l’adresse, la couleur de peau réduisent encore trop souvent encore l’égalité des chances que chacun
doit avoir.
Nous serons intraitables face au racisme, à l’antisémitisme et aux discriminations et de nouvelles
décisions fortes seront prises.
Mais ce combat noble est dévoyé lorsqu’il se transforme en communautarisme, en réécriture
haineuse ou fausse du passé. Ce combat est inacceptable lorsqu’il est récupéré par les séparatistes.
Je vous le dis très clairement ce soir mes chers compatriotes, la République n’effacera aucune trace
ni aucun nom de son Histoire. La République ne déboulonnera pas de statue. Nous devons plutôt
lucidement regarder ensemble toute notre Histoire, toutes nos mémoires, notre rapport à l’Afrique
en particulier, pour bâtir un présent et un avenir possible, d’une rive l’autre de la Méditerranée
avec une volonté ́ de vérité et en aucun cas de revisiter ou de nier ce que nous sommes.
Nous ne bâtirons pas davantage notre avenir dans le désordre.
Sans ordre républicain, il n’y a ni sécurité, ni liberté. Cet ordre, ce sont les policiers et les
gendarmes sur notre sol qui l’assurent. Ils sont exposés à des risques quotidiens en notre nom,
c’est pourquoi ils méritent le soutien de la puissance publique et la reconnaissance de la Nation.

3
On one hand, Macron does acknowledge the varying forms of discrimination that are carried by le
nom, l’adresse, la couleur de peau. However, though it seems that the speech recognizes a certain degree
of systematic racism within French society, at the same time, there are heavy charges that what is
taking place is by and large a hateful rewriting of history (réécriture haineuse ou fausse du passé) inspired by
communitarisme or separatist forces. Macron, by not naming the protests and the anti-police brutality
motive behind them, essentially dismisses the protests, without ever needing to even address them, by
saying, quite simply: that isn’t us— this does not apply here. Throughout his speech, he does not pronounce
once the words demonstration, protest, or manifestation. What he does say is that the police are the
vanguards of French society against those who would seek to divide and cause the country’s fall. He
does not mention who those potential enemies of the state are: simply that the people who we should be
vigilant about are the separatists, the revisionists, and the communautaristes. That is the State’s official
position on race: identity politics are for Americans with their hyphenated identities. Which is to say,
ultimately, that isn’t “us.”
The framework of crisis connotes an external attack: a foreign element is introduced and
causes catastrophic results, which is essentially the logic of the Grand Remplacement
2
and anti-immigrant
xenophobia. It is external in the sense that there is a mitigating agent. Macron’s speech follows a logic
of crisis, first referring to COVID-19 (the pandemic crisis, in the true sense of catastrophe), and then
seamlessly transitions to his attitudes towards “communautarisme,” by which he seems to mean the anti-
police brutality protests in Paris, without ever having to name them directly, as if these demonstrations
were a continuation, a secondary symptom of the crise. In French media and politics, communautarisme

2
“Le grand remplacement” is the conspiracy theory, authored by Renault Camus, that suggests that global elites
are flooding Europe and prosperous Western democracies with cheap, foreign labor from the Third World in
order to further an agenda of dehumanization and ultimately “white genocide,” which has been espoused by
international far-right movements, including members of the Front National, or as it is known today, the
Rassemblement National. For more, see Chapter Four of this dissertation.
4
is generally associated with Islamic fundamentalism and the immigrant “enclaves” of the suburbs.
Presented as a mitigated import, communitarianism is introduced as fundamentally incompatible with
republican universalism, and a threat to sovereignty itself.
In fact, Macron seems to habitually use the term communautarisme interchangeably with
separatism. In the speech cited above, he proclaims that “ce combat noble est dévoyé lorsqu’il se transforme en
communautarisme, en réécriture haineuse ou fausse du passé. Ce combat noble est inacceptable lorsqu’il est récupéré
par les séparatistes.” His direct reference to combat, likening this struggle to a battle, accentuates the
urgency and seriousness with which he believes the situation must be resolved— in the name of
republican order, public safety, and liberty: “Sans ordre républicain, il n’y a ni sécurité, ni liberté.”
The official aversion to race has been destructive and toxic for minority communities in France
and has simultaneously made it easier for France to mask disparities and discrimination in civilian life.
Because there are no official census statistics about the relationship between race or religion in France,
by law, it is not possible for the State to have any information about discriminatory practices and
deficiencies in areas such as employment, housing, health, income, lending practices, education,
arrests, incarceration, or identification checks
3
. As such, in France, there are no official ethnoreligious
statistics in the national census. By the loi de 1978 « Informatique et libertés », il est interdit de collecter ou de
traiter des données à caractère personnel qui font apparaître, directement ou indirectement, les origines raciales ou
ethniques, les opinions politiques, philosophiques ou religieuses ou l'appartenance syndicale des personnes, ou qui sont
relatives à la santé ou à la vie sexuelle de celles-ci. »

3
Researchers and statisticians (not affiliated with the state) are allowed to collect data for the purpose of studies
only if subjects are anonymous.
5
Just this year, the lack of official data prevented, and continues to prevent, statistical analysis
of the communities most impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. However, like the United States, where
minority communities (primarily Latinx and Black communities) were disproportionately impacted,
France’s “neuf-trois” (postal code 93), Seine-Saint-Denis
4
banlieue was hit the hardest. The northern
Parisian suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis (population 1.6 million
5
) is home to a large population of
immigrants, many of whom are from former French colonies in Africa, the descendants of immigrants,
and many people living below the poverty line. It has one of the highest rates of unemployment in the
country and is considered the poorest area of metropolitan France. Exact statistics about the
ethnoreligious composition of the region are not available because the French state prohibits official
religious or racial registers.
Universalism is understood as the foundational value of the Republic. In theory, universalism
signifies that all French nationals are free and equal under the laws of the Republic. In practice,
universalism means that ethnoreligious differences are essentially “irrelevant” in the eyes of the law
under the aegis of laïcité, France’s idiomatic version of secularism. Thus, because race and religion are
protected categories, there is no official census data about this information because it is considered
private and privileged
6
.

4
Top autofill search result questions for Seine-Saint-Denis: “Is St. Denis Paris safe?” and “Is Seine-Saint-Denis
dangerous?”. Third search result: “Why is Seine-Saint-Denis such a bad place?”. The sixth result refers to the
area as a “no-go zone”. This coded language designates the connoted association of the ethnoreligious and
safety.
5
From Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE)
https://www.insee.fr/fr/metadonnees/cog/departement/DEP93-seine-saint-denis
6
In 2018, “sex” replaced “race” in the Constitution, making it a privileged category. The Constitution of the
Fourth Republic’s (1946) Preamble reads: “La France est une République indivisible, laïque, démocratique et
sociale. Elle assure l’égalité devant la loi de tous les citoyens sans distinction d’origine, de race ou de religion.”
The Constitution of the Fifth Republic (1958), Article 1 reads: “La France est une République indivisible, laïque,
démocratique et sociale. Elle assure l’égalité devant la loi de tous les citoyens sans distinction d’origine, de race

6
To a certain extent, the desire to ban ethnoreligious registers can be understood as a
countermeasure against France’s Jewish registers, compiled before the arrival of the Nazis in June
1940, which facilitated various roundups and deportations to concentration camps. One of the most
infamous roundups of the Vichy era, the Vél d’Hiv, or the Vélodrome d’Hiver of 1942, was defended by
Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the leader of the Commissariat général aux questions juives, as a “public
hygiene” measure. Vichy is at the root of some of France’s existing population studies and
demography institutes: the study of modern demography is a direct offshoot of Marshal Pétain’s
Fondation Française pour l’étude des problèmes humaines, cofounded in 1941 with Alexis Carrel, eugenicist at
the Rockefeller Institute and winner of the 1912 Nobel Prize in Medicine. In 1945, the Fondation
became the Institut national d’études démographiques (INED), and brought along much of its personnel.
Understandably then, the trauma of collaboration and the devastating tragedy of World War
II has created distaste for the concept and even the word race. The Constitution of the Fourth and
Fifth Republics included a direct reference to race in its first article, whereby it is designated as a
protected category. However, the term “race” remains associated with the ethnonationalism of the
Nazis, and thus a reminder of France’s own collaborationist past.
Quite recently, the Fifth Republic decided to put some kind of distance, some kind of assurances that,
again: that’s not us. We see this most clearly in the actions of the Assemblée Nationale whose members
voted unanimously to remove the word “race” from the Constitution in 2018— though the RN
deputies were absent across the board at the time of the vote. In what follows, the Assembly presents

ou de religion.” In 2018, it was changed to: “La France est une République indivisible, laïque, démocratique et
sociale. Elle assure l’égalité devant la loi de tous les citoyens sans distinction de sexe, d’origine, ou de religion.”
However, unlike race or religion, sex is officially recognized by the census and thus it remains legal to collect
data pertaining to sex.
7
its argument for why the word race is no longer relevant to French society, and is moreover dangerous
because it has traditionally accompanied genocide:
L'inscription du terme « race », dans l'article même qui dispose des valeurs fondamentales
de la République, est inadmissible même dans une « phrase qui a pour objet de lui dénier
toute portée » (Guy Carcassonne in « la Constitution de 1958 commentée »). La
Constitution, dès son article 1
er
, reconnaît en effet l'usage d'un terme dont l'application à
l'espèce humaine est, non seulement inopérante, mais surtout, choquante et
dangereuse…Le mot « race » a toujours servi de support au discours qui prélude à
l'extermination des peuples…Supprimer le support ne supprime pas le discours mais la
légitimité qu'il pourrait puiser dans la loi fondamentale. En effet, lorsque la Constitution
interdit à la loi d'établir une distinction selon « la race », elle légitime paradoxalement et
donc en creux l'opinion selon laquelle il existe des « races distinctes » … L'argument selon
lequel la suppression de ce mot risquerait d'impliquer une régression dans la lutte contre
les discriminations doit donc être écarté puisque qu'il n'existe pas de « races humaines »
distinctes…
7

In addition to being used uniformly (toujours) as a medium or material support to the discourse that
precedes the extermination of people, the word “race” in the Constitution, according to the
argumentation presented above, suggests that races exist, which according to this deputy, they do not. And
this is where the tension surges—does acknowledging race make race real (assuming it is not real to
begin with)? Does saying the word race performatively
8
conjure up races? The Assembly is correct and
on the right side of science if what they mean to suggest is that there is no such thing as a hierarchically
or biologically distinct race. It seems, for now, we are no longer living in the era where scientific
racism, meaning the pseudo-scientific, pseudo-medical study of racial hierarchy, is recognized as
legitimate in Western democracy. Race as a biological marker of superiority or inferiority is no longer
overtly acceptable in Western society at large, though it is covertly communicated in a variety of ways
9
.

7
http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/12/propositions/pion1918.asp. Consulted 9/12/2020.
8
In the sense of a performative in Speech Act Theory (J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words).
Performatively, thus, as if race were some kind of magic word, spell, incantation, or rune. Such that when
spoken, it would make something appear.
9
See Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism Without Racists : Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial
Inequality in America. 4th edition, Rowman & Littlefield Pub., 2014.
8
Racism as a system, as an institution that is deeply rooted in the racial ideology of Western democratic
nations, lives on, although its biological postulate has been invalidated.
Does talking about race mean that race is “real”? This question, in itself, will entrap you.
Removing the word “race” from the Constitution or from conversation, does not make race (or
racism, which is really what this question should be about) disappear. Questioning the existence (which
is to say, relevance) of race designates a deeper tension about the State’s unwillingness to address or
validate the reality of everyday experience for millions of French citizens marked by race or “color”
who are discriminated against: it epitomizes what Ann Laura Stoler calls “colonial aphasia”.
In various iterations, France has conceptualized its relation to immigration as precipitously
leading to an identity crisis, une crise d’identité. From the Franco-Prussian War to the Eastern European
refugees of World War One; from the Croix de Feu to Vichy to Le Pen; from the colonial regimes
through decolonization, right on and well into the ongoing refugee migrations from the Middle East
and Africa, and the xenophobia that often accompanies these migratory waves, France has envisioned
itself, time after time, amidst various crises de l’identité. Without delving into the details of these histories
in this preliminary stage, I suggest that the crise is more of a trouble
10
.
Un trouble is not a crisis, in the sense of emergency—an urgency that suddenly and unexpectedly
emerges. A crisis suddenly appears out of nowhere and is now urgently something that needs to be
attacked or combatted, as if it were an external enemy or a foreign element. Unlike a crise cardiaque or
even a crise d’angoisse, it did not abruptly or unexpectedly manifest: it is neither a rough patch, nor an
outbreak, nor a fit. Identity trouble is not an attack, but rather, it has some structural resonance with

10
I prefer the nuance of the French trouble, over its translation as “disorder” because disorder over-medicalizes
it, though I do believe that there are dimensions of this trouble d’identité that are corporally or internally located
and affectively felt. Furthermore, I do see it as a kind of neurosis, in the sense that it is a kind of mental disorder
not caused by organic physical disease. I am not entirely using this term as a metaphor.
9
a disorder, an underlying condition. For this reason, I suggest, in the place of crisis, the framework of
un trouble: a chronic condition, waxing and waning but always present, that may lay dormant at times
and intensify at others.
The word trouble permits a reorientation of the approach regarding identity in which we hear,
see, and feel the evocations of its murky terrain, its lack of focus, the confusion, the distress, and the
turmoil, the uncertainty at the core of this discussion. It disrupts, disturbs, disconcerts, sometimes it
blurs or dims, other times it baffles: it is a “disorder” that dis-orders. It is an underlying condition that
has been transmitted generationally, perhaps even neurotically, and has the ability to transform over
time. Above all, it is not something that is necessarily easy to pinpoint and target in order to “cure” or
“treat,” as it has the capacity to transform over time and according to its circumstances and situation.
In any case, this trouble reveals a complex network of transmissions that take place on individual and
collective levels. In this way, French society can be seen to suffer from this disorder, through the lens
of the renegotiations and amendments of its most sacred Constitutional documents. The primary
vehicle of individual transmission is cultural: enacted through systems of knowledge, through
socialization, which occurs first and foremost in education received from schooling, from familial or
close relationships, and various forms of media (news, books, cartoons, songs, films, etc.). In this
study of troubles de l’identité, I explore how and through which means of cultural transmissions, from
the family to the state, one comes to understand what it means to be “French”. “Trouble” suggests
that the condition is chronic, it can be dormant, it can intensify, and it can change direction over time.
It is internal, can be inherited, and can be transmissible.
Furthermore, the framework of crisis does not fit this dynamic because these troubles are
durable, or in other words, they are caught between multiple temporalities of past, present, and future.
It is illogical to talk about a crisis in terms of a long-standing, centuries-old situation. A crisis, by
10
definition, is something that arises suddenly and intensely, while indicating a decisive rupture with the
past: “L'accent est mis sur l'idée de manifestation brusque et intense de certains phénomènes, marquant une rupture
11
.”
If immigration and globalization, understood as penetrative forces thrust upon France’s sociocultural
composition and traditional way of life, are oft targeted as the root of these troubles, the supposition
would be that before such phenomena, France represented an ethnoreligiously homogenous and self-
sustaining nation.
However, this nostalgic fantasy is quickly thwarted when history enters the collective
consciousness— “foreign invasion” is not only triumphant and progressive when France is the agent
of occupation on foreign land (i.e. colonization), but remains triggering, threatening, and provokes
virulent indignation when France is being “occupied” by foreigners. This dehistoricized vision has
transformed nostalgia into a veritable political program, by weaponizing a romanticized and revisionist
past and attempting to revive agrarian or folkloric customs, while expelling elements identified as un-
French. The immuno-logic of xenophobia, or the pathological im-pulse of ex-pulsion is explored and
repeated throughout this dissertation in various ways.
My first point of entry will be through an analysis of who is French, through an examination
of French nationality law and its various permutations from the Revolution to the present. The way
that citizenship is transmitted or withheld presents the values, anxieties, and sociocultural attitudes
vis-à-vis Frenchness of a given time. Because they are created and the product of construction,
meaning nations are built, they represent complex sets of desires, ideals, and fears. One way of
examining these complexities is to look at legal history. These policies provide insight to the shifting
political sensibilities of national identity, not only in designating who falls under the protection of the

11
Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales, https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/crise
11
nation, but equally as important, who is excluded from these protections and privileges. By
contextualizing of nationality law historically, this trouble d’identité reveals itself to be enduring, or
durable, in the sense of Ann Laura Stoler’s Duress
12
, while simultaneously remaining transformable,
and to a certain extent, literary.
As literary, perhaps even sacred documents, laws have the potential to orient our analyses of
histories towards how a nation sees itself or what it envisions for its future. At the same time, they
enrich our understanding of the past and can be understood as “imperial formations.” Stoler argues
for a reconceptualization of the most urgent issues of the present day as continuations of colonial
histories, which are “steeped in the colonial histories of which they have been, and in some cases
continue to be, a part.” Thus, in this way, globalization and the ecological racism
13
it entails are directly
connected to these imperial formations, intimately interwoven with the contemporary world. The
imperial world remains tangible in systems of governance and systemic racism, and in the “emotional
economies of humiliations, indignities, and resentments” that can be attested to in a number of ways,
including movements like the most recent protests against police brutality throughout the western
world.
The manifestation of resentments against police brutality, particularly with regards to the
murder and brutalization of people of color, reveals that law enforcement remains, to this day, a
feature of “colonial counterinsurgency,” undiluted in the present. These durable formations are not
in danger of disappearing, but quite the contrary: “Molten in their form, colonial entailments may lose

12
Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in our Times. Duke University Press Books, 2016. Likewise,
Stoler’s discussion of colonial aphasia, understood as France’s inability to form a meaningful discourse about
its colonial past, can be applied in terms of France’s aphasic relation to race, tout court.
13
Meaning the tangible gulf of prosperity and privilege between the Global South and Western nations, where
the ecology and natural resources of the Global South are exploited to serve the capitalist interests of Western
enterprise.
12
their visible and identifiable presence in the vocabulary, conceptual grammar, and idioms of current
concerns. It is the effort of this venture to halt in the face of these processes of occlusion and
submersion, to ask about how they work, their differential effects; and on whom they most palpably
act
14
.”
Colonial formations have not disappeared so much as they have changed form. Like spewing
lava that has spread and hardened, integrating into the natural landscape, these colonial formations
have become durable and enduring features of contemporary existence. The “molten” form is the
titular referent of the “duress” of colonial legacies. Duress is essentially Stoler’s solution to the false
temporalization that postcolonial studies commonly frames as vestiges or haunting. For Stoler, the
lexicon of “traces” confines the colonial to a false temporality: by referring to colonial formations as
traces, the colonial is inadvertently fixed in the past, as if it were over and done with
15
. Duress, on the
other hand, signals a “strange continuity,” or “the hardened, tenacious qualities of colonial effects;
their extended protracted temporalities; and, not least, their durable, if sometimes intangible
constraints and confinements.”
The chain of duress, durability, and duration function to sketch out a historical etymology, to
which she adds the word endurance in order to address this ability of duress to “hold out” and “last,”
“to endure.”
16
The logic of duress is that, unlike traces or haunting, the colonial has not disappeared
or faded so much as it has transformed or gone underground. Using Ralph Ellison’s terminology
17
,
this duress resonates at “the lower frequencies”: it is not high-pitched drama, but rather a kind of dog-

14
Duress 4
15
In her keynote address at the annual CSLC Graduate studies Colloquium on February 28
th
, 2019, Stoler
likened this difference to French past tenses: the vocabulary of traces implies a passé composé, which is a
completed act in the past, as opposed to the imperfect past, which would imply a continuity.
16
Duress 7
17
The final line of The Invisible Man reads, “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”
13
whistle, functioning sometimes in a non-verbal register. In its occlusion, duress becomes “an act that
hides and conceals,” and is not incidental: occlusions are “neither an accidental byproduct of imperial
formations nor merely a missed opportunity, rendered visible to a critical witness ‘after the fact.’ They
are not just neglected, overlooked, or ‘forgotten.’ They inhere in their conceptual, epistemic, and
political architecture.
18
” One such example of occlusion is France’s lack of an official census with
regards to race and religion. It is, in fact, illegal for the French State to collect such information about
its citizens.
France’s official forays into national identity-building can be summed up by three strategies: a
“color-blind” approach to republican citizenship and duty; insistence upon integration as a method of
assimilation for immigrants; and a staunch anti-communautarisme attitude. I use the term “color-
blindness” in quotes for two reasons: there is no true equivalent expression in the French language;
and I will argue that this approach is exemplary of aphasia. Aphasia, employed here metaphorically,
describes a condition in which words and objects are dismembered, rendered irretrievable, or
incomprehensible. It is not meant to imply a passivity, but rather, “a loss of access that may verge on
active dissociation.
19
”
Aphasia is thus an activated effort of knowing and not-knowing, suspended in a state of half-
ignorance or disavowal. The simultaneity of “ignorance” and knowledge characterizes the aphasic
state, which is both a political state and a state of being. For Stoler, aphasia indicates that forgetting is
not necessarily innocent, particularly when it pertains to histories and national narratives: her work on
colonial aphasia challenges us to think of occlusion as a covert political act.

18
Duress 10
19
Duress 12
14
French President Emmanuel Macron’s address from June 2020, exemplifies a very
idiosyncratic version of aphasia: his speech addresses the recent protests against police brutality
without ever having to mention them. Not once does he use the word protest, protesters,
demonstration; not once does he address the main motivation and ideology behind the protests. What
Macron does mention operates on a much lower frequency: communautarisme. The conceptual slippage
from the crisis of coronavirus to the crisis of mass protests expertly identifies both as a threat to public
health (hygiene) and safety without having to make it explicit. In this speech, he relies on two concepts
to evoke security: order and the Republic. We should proceed with these concepts as if we did not
know what they meant simply because we cannot be entirely sure what they refer to. Macron’s speech
has nearly no content that does not rely on conceptual frameworks and codewords.
Functioning as a kind of dog whistle for Islamic separationism, the term communitarisme is often
leveled at group identities that are considered ‘threatening’ to universal republicanism. The anxiety
surrounding the state’s relationship to Islam, in particular, is displayed in many of the political
initiatives undertaken to combat a totalitarization of identity. In this way, being-French comes first: one
may have roots and cultural heritage, but so long as one seeks to live in France and ‘be French’, those
cultural affiliations must come second and must not contradict the values of French society.
‘Islam’ itself can also be heard on the ‘lower frequencies,’ if you will, as a dog-whistle term for
North African immigration (or immigration in general). This chain of signifiers—communitarisme,
séparatistes, Islam, immigration, Afrique [du Nord]—have come to embody the primary threat to cultural
homogeneity, as traditionally employed by the far-right, but this collapse or amalgamation has become
increasingly mainstream in the past twenty years. In order to understand how this has gone from fringe
xenophobia to the mainstream, one must do the work of historicization. I argue that this semantic
collapse did not come out of the blue, but rather is a symptom of the underlying troubles identitaires of
15
the French nation-state. As part and parcel of the nation-state’s scramble for sovereignty, these
troubles appear as a result of the theologico-political underpinnings that are covered up under the
guise of universal republicanism.
The main premise of this dissertation is that contemporary France is not having an identity
“crisis”: France has, and has been having for a long time, identity disorder, or trouble de l’identité. Because
the issue has been longstanding, recurring, although perhaps at times, latent, I find the comparison to
“crisis” both weak and insufficient. At worst, it is dangerous to categorize as a crisis, the implication
being that the issue has arisen both out of nowhere and suddenly. This simply is not true. If somebody
were having repeated asthma attacks, we wouldn’t consider each attack necessarily distinct
phenomena: the underlying triggers or causes would be examined, and the crises would be treated as
symptomatic of a larger disorder. This is not to suggest that each “crisis” is exactly the same, and they
should absolutely be examined in light of their singularity. However, there is a danger in not seeing
the patterns and treating the individual crises instead of looking at the body, here, France, as a whole.
One of the ways in which I conceptualize this trouble is through a study of France’s nationality
laws from the Revolution onwards. Secondly, France’s aphasic relationship with regards to race
exemplifies one of the ways this trouble manifests itself. I not only identify these two factors as
symptoms of this problem, which is, in itself, a way of approaching the causes of the issue: I also ask
what is the effect on French society as a whole? In other words, I ask not only, what is the concept of
national identity and where are its tensions, but what do these conceptualizations and tensions reveal
about the sociocultural ideology, i.e. not just what, but how. Thus, the question is two-fold: it is both,
where do tensions reveal themselves and what do such tensions do?
16
From the very inception of the French republic, French national identity has relied on
Enlightenment ideals and aversions. Universalism, égalité, humanism, republicanism, and later, laïcité
and anti-communautarisme are all salient today. This study intends to reconceptualize the very notion of
national identity, albeit one relying on Enlightenment concepts, and how it functions in today’s society.
I have thematized this study into four primary parts: firstly, the question of citizenship, or
plainly, who or what is French? The first chapter of this dissertation takes French naturalization law
as a starting point for exploring how, legislatively, the French nation has envisioned itself and its
citizens. As an imperial power, and particularly one that underwent the upheaval of Revolution and
Occupation, France has been reimagining itself and its reach throughout the modern era. In this
chapter, I trace a historical trajectory from the Revolution to modern day, contextualizing the laws
and political movements concerning nationality alongside the desires expressed by them.
In modern Western democracies, there have been two main ways of legislating citizenship:
blood and soil, jus sanguinis and jus soli. Blood and soil may raise a red flag, specifically a Nazi one, who
took the phrase as a slogan for their nationalist cause. In any case, I’ve chosen to separate thematically
conceptualizations of blood and soil as pertaining to national identity into two chapters. My main
question in these chapters concerns the kinds of stories blood and soil are able to narrate, and where
such stories can take us, insofar as they shape politics.
The end results vary: In my study, I have chosen to focus on three currents. Firstly, through a
study of blood and a reading of Jacques Derrida’s most autobiographical texts, Le Monolingualisme de
l’autre and Circonfession in Chapter Two. It is my contention that Derrida’s deconstruction of identity is
highly political, although he has been understood as apolitical by critics, including Ann Laura Stoler.
It is my intention to represent these positions as means of repoliticizing language via deconstructive
17
practice. By focusing on blood, I am able to bring together the principle of jus sanguinis, eugenics,
immigration and the pseudo-biological discourses that support them in order to expose their
theologico-political underpinnings. Blood represents one dimension of this theologico-political
discourse, under the pretense of legality or science and disguised as such. The nation, as conceptualized
as a body, a national body, participates in an economy of pseudo-biology that ultimately functions to
obscure its theological foundation: the notion of purity or of the discernibility of an absolute point of
origin is exposed as a phantasm.
In Chapter Three, I turn to an identificatory model of fluidity, as seen in the works of Hélène
Cixous. Cixous invents what she refers to in Photos de Racine, “une nationalité littéraire”:
En France, ce qui est tombé de moi d’abord, c’est l’obligation de l’identité juive. D’une
part, l’antisémitisme était incomparablement plus faible à Paris qu’à Alger. D’autre part,
j’ai brusquement appris que ma vérité inacceptable dans ce monde était mon être femme.
Tout de suite, ce fut la guerre. J’ai senti l’explosion, l’odeur, de la misogynie. Jusqu’ici,
vivant dans un monde de femmes, je ne l’avais pas sentie, j’étais juive, j’étais juif…A partir
de 1955, j’ai adopté une nationalité imaginaire qui est la nationalité littéraire.
20

Cixous’s deconstruction of nationality through the vehicle of fiction and literature reveals her
attachment to and her politicization of the French language, and at the same time, calling attention to
the fictive, fictitious, and thus deconstructable quality of nationality and borders. As a counterpart to
jus sanguinis, Chapter Three reimagines the possibility of a relationship to the soil, or the jus soli.
While blood and soil are examined separately as transmissions of inheritance, chance, and
hospitality, in Chapter Four, blood and soil are grouped together in Chapter Five, focusing on a
particular current in contemporary mainstream French politics: The Front National and identitarian
movements. Identitarian movements have found a foothold in the political and cultural scene of a

20
PR 207
18
globalized and social mediacentric twenty-first century. With the two-fold arrival of the Le Pen dynasty
to the second rounds of French presidential elections in 2002 and 2017, identitarian politics have
arguably become much more widely acceptable in France than in the past. Though the RN publicly
and officially denies any relation to what they refer to as “groupuscules,” identitarian movements like
Génération Identitaire reveal just how much they share in common with the vision of the ‘real’ France.
For Identitarians and their sympathizers, the metaphor of the national body has been taken literally:
through a logic of expulsion, purification, and decontamination, identitarians see the future of Europe
as a return to its ‘roots’ by rejecting all that is ‘foreign.’

Chapter One
19

Who is French ? Nationality laws

A preliminary observation of French naturalization law reveals that France has reformed and revised
its policies regarding citizenship more so than its Western Democratic counterparts. Building on the
work of historian Patrick Weil and sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad, this chapter seeks to ground France’s
trouble de l’identité historically by tracing the various naturalization laws passed in France. Patrick Weil’s
Qu’est-ce qu’un français: Histoire de la nationalité française depuis la Révolution explores the history of French
naturalization law from the Revolution to the early twenty-first century. In its most condensed form,
his text seeks to answer the question: what makes one French? The politics of nationality law reflect
the specific concerns and anxieties of the epoch, and signal the historical problems defining French
identity. This chapter and the chapters that follow
21
will emphasize the tensions and the anxieties of
producing legible borders between citizen and foreigner, between French and non-French, which I
argue, remains a pivotal issue in contemporary French society.

21
Of particular importance for Chapter Two and Three will be the Crémieux Decree of 1870, which gave
French citizenship to Jewish Algerians, and its revocation between October 1940 and March 1943. Moreover,
the disputed territory of Alsace-Lorraine, lost after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and later regained by
France by the Treaty of Versailles following the end of World War I in 1918, subsequently redrawing of the
borders between France and Germany will feature importantly in Chapter Three.
20
Despite the various changes undergone throughout the years, French nationality laws can be
broken down into three main categories: jus sanguinis, jus soli, and naturalizations. Each group has
particularities and requirements for eligibility. At this preliminary moment, I will emphasize that these
requirements are often highly convoluted and time-sensitive, and overall, not widely accessible or
publicized, particularly for those seeking naturalization without mastery of the French language.
Naturalizations are considered for residents who do not have rights to citizenship through family or
birth in France; who are over the age of eighteen; who wish to acquire citizenship through marriage;
or through military service in the French Foreign Legion. For people with familial ties to France or
who were born in France, naturalization law recognizes both jus sanguinis and jus soli to determine
French nationality, meaning that Frenchness can be bestowed through filiation and through place of
birth, if a number of provisions are met. Through jus sanguinis, automatic citizenship is accorded to a
child born in France to at least one French parent. A child born abroad to at least one French citizen
is also able to acquire French citizenship under the condition that the child is declared in the French
civil register before age eighteen. In cases of adoption, the child acquires French nationality only if
“plenary adoption” is enacted, which requires breaking all filiation with the child’s family of origin,
and parentage has to be established in the French civil register while the child is under the age of
eighteen. If an adoption is enacted after the age of majority is reached, there is no transmission of
citizenship rights.
Beginning with the Nationality Code of 1889, France began to recognize double jus soli: a
category of naturalization in which a child with at least one parent born in France (even if that parent
is not a citizen) is automatically considered a French citizen. At the time of the Code’s instauration,
the non-French European settlers of Algeria, who had been preceded by at least one generation of
Algerian-born parentage, were granted naturalization rights. Following Algerian Independence in
21
1962, a provision of double jus soli was made for children who were born in France after January 1
st
,
1963 to a parent who was born in French Algeria before July 3
rd
, 1962. Likewise, an additional
provision was made for children born in France before January 1
st
, 1994 to a parent who was born in
a former overseas territory before its independence is automatically French at birth. Children in this
category who were born after or on January 1
st
, 1994 in France acquire French citizenship at age
eighteen.
Provisions and requirements for children who wish to be naturalized as French are a bit more
complicated. According to jus soli, a child born in France does not automatically receive French
citizenship for having been born on French soil if their parents are both foreign. The child may acquire
French citizenship under specific conditions at various stages of their childhood. The only condition
under which a child in this category can acquire citizenship at birth is if he or she is considered
“stateless,” or apatrides, meaning that both parents are either unknown or are themselves “stateless,”
or if the laws of the parents’ countries of origin do not have provisions for automatic transference of
citizenship to their child.
At the age of eighteen, French nationality is “automatically” acquired by a child who was born
in France and continues to reside in France on his or her eighteenth birthday, provided that his or her
primary residence has been in France for a total of at least five years (non-continuous) since age eleven.
The moniker “automatic” may be misleading, however, because the recipient must apply for
citizenship. Moreover, the application process is often confusing, convoluted, and, consequently,
difficult to access in order to complete in the given time frame. However, the recipient of this
“automatic” naturalization maintains the right to decline French nationality. A child between the age
of sixteen and eighteen has the right to apply directly for citizenship, without parental consent (unless
mentally or physically disabled), so long as the child was born in France, resides in France on the day
22
that the declaration is made, and has his or her primary residence in France for a total of five years
(non-consecutively) since the age of eleven. For children between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, a
parental request can be filed if the child has lived in France since age eight. A child in this case must,
as a prerequisite, consent to the parental request. The provisions include that the child was born in
France, has had his or her primary residence in France since the age of eight and lives in France on
the day of the parental request.
Naturalizations, as mentioned above, are available to foreigners aged eighteen and above after
a period of five consecutive years of residency in France. During the five-year period preceding the
application, the applicant must have a primary source of income in France and a titre de séjour.
22

Requirements for residency can be waived in particular circumstances, including French military
service and refugee status. Reduced waiting periods of two years are available for students pursuing a
higher education in France who have received a degree in France, or who have demonstrated
“exceptional service” to France. The residency period is counted retroactively from the official
declaration, and any irregular or illegal residence in France is not counted towards the minimum
requirement.
As naturalizations are considered on a case-by-case basis, there are criteria that make some
applicants more successful than others. The highest degrees of success are attained by individuals who
display a certain level of “integration,” which they are able to communicate during a prearranged
interview at a local prefecture. Applicants are urged to prove the extent of their linguistic capabilities
and their personal understanding of and respect for republican values as future French citizens. The
applicant must likewise prove their intent or their ability to succeed on the job market, have no

22
Citizens of the European Union and Swiss nationals are exempt from this provision.
23
criminal offenses exceeding six months of incarceration, and no outstanding tax debts. The application
is reviewed by the officials of the Prefecture, who generally oversee cases within one year of
submission.
Other pathways to naturalization include marriage to a French citizen for five years, at which
point a request for naturalization can be made, granted that the couple has lived together during that
time period. One can apply for naturalization after four years if the couple has lived consistently in
France for three years following the legal registration of marriage. Additionally, all applicants must be
able to speak and write French and the couple must appear in person together during the process of
documentation and signatures. France’s Légion Étrangère, or the French Foreign Legion, is another way
for foreigners to acquire naturalization. After three years of service to the legion, which is a branch of
the army that accepts soldiers of any nationality, one is eligible to apply for citizenship. There is also
a provision made for soldiers wounded in battle during Legion service, allowing them to apply without
a waiting period under the principle of spilled blood : “Français par le sang versé ”. The formulation
français par le sang versé is striking in its poetics, it is even more striking in the idea that blood sacrifice is
a pathway to naturalization. I immediately thought of another group of soldiers, ones who fought for
France without having full recognition of their rights as Frenchmen: the Harkis. Only belatedly were
such men granted the status of français par le sang versé, though blood was most certainly spilled. The
revelatory nature of such policies can be observed with regards to France’s colonial empire, particularly
in the settler colony of Algeria, exemplified by its explicitly legalized racial and religious structural
hierarchy.
French Algeria exemplifies a case where questions of citizenship, Frenchness, and Republican
universalism are strained to their limits. Characterized by an original artificiality, the originary myth of
the mission civilisatrice, French Algeria reveals the ideological failure of the attempted extension of
24
Republicanism, liberalism, and universalism to the colonies. While French colonialism and its
ethnoreligious hierarchy can be interpreted as a contradiction to the philosophy of universalism, it
may be more fruitful to consider that the ethnoreligious superiority of White (Catholic, Latin)
Europeans is built into the very structure of Republicanism and the humanist tradition. In other words,
the exclusion of colonized peoples from universal equality is both a contradiction and a structural
element of Republican humanism. Such a distinction creates space for this tension to exist and helps
us to understand how the ideals of the Republic, emerging from the Enlightenment, both help and
hinder ethnoreligious inclusivity with regards to concepts of Frenchness and the French Republic.
This is not to suggest that this tension has been resolved through the dissolution of empire: on the
contrary, the tension has intensified as a result of the convergence of debates on legal citizenship and
identity. The naturalization laws and initiatives enacted proceeding the dissolution of French Algeria,
in particular, ignited fierce debates on not only who should be considered French, but where, or, in other
words, what are the boundaries of France in light of its Empire. In French Algeria, the three
départements of Algiers, Oran, and Constantine were considered French soil, meaning that any person
born there during French rule, was born in France, subject to the specificities of naturalization at the
time.
To put it briefly, naturalization in French Algeria was initially reserved for French settlers. The
composition of the Algerian population from the time of annexation to Independence included
French, Jewish, Berber, Muslim, and non-French Europeans
23
. Two mass naturalizations took place
during the Nineteenth Century in French Algeria, albeit ones that applied to relatively small parts of
the population: the Crémieux decree of 1870 naturalized Jewish Algerians in French Algeria, and
thereafter, the law of 1889 for non-French Europeans. During the French occupation of Algeria, other

23
The non-French European settler population included nationals from Italy, Spain, Malta, Portugal, and to a
lesser extent, Germany.
25
options opened up for colonial “subjects” to apply for full citizenship, though this was generally not
a common practice and was unofficially discouraged with the long, costly, overly complicated
application process.
Throughout Weil’s study, he highlights the effects of naturalization law on groups of
marginalized people, including women, Jewish communities, and Algerian Muslims. Patrick Weil
identifies these areas of tension or contradiction as “border zones”. These three subgroups embody
such “border zones” of nationality, which are “constantly being renegotiated and crossed, not an
enclosure.
24
” These border zones are particularly rife with tensions and are thus sites that must be
explored in order to understand the mined terrain of nationality. The situations presented by French
imperialism, and particularly the colonization of Algeria, as well as gender inequality, represent
obstacles to defining French identity in the face of the republican promise of equality. The twentieth
century in particular brought crises of subjective legibility to women, colonized peoples, particularly
in Algeria, Jewish people, refugees, and undocumented migrant workers. Immigration remains today
the foremost political issue in regional and national elections, ultimately framed as a question of
national security and autonomy by the current centrist government of Emmanuel Macron
25
and the
far-right Rassemblement National (formerly the Front National) alike.
In common law, the two most basic forms of nationality law in modern democratic societies
are jus sanguinis, or right of blood, and jus soli, right of soil. Since the Revolution, French law has
oscillated between the familial model and the socialization model of citizenship, or has been a
combination of both, as it stands now. However, those are not the only two modes by which one
acquires nationality—in addition to jus soli and sanguinis, jus domicili, “right to residence” can be

24
Weil 3
25
Édouard Philippe, Prime Minister, Discours du 6 novembre 2019, speech outlining immigration reform goals.
https://www.vie-publique.fr/discours/271859-edouard-philippe-6112019-politique-de-limmigration
26
established, as can marriage, and military service in certain cases. Before the French Revolutionary
period, there was no formal definition of what or who was to be considered French: the word
nationality did not formally exist until the nineteenth century, first appearing in the 1835 edition of
the Dictionnaire de Académie Française. Before the Revolution, one was defined by the quality of
Frenchness (qualité de Français). In the early days of the Revolution, one could not be a citizen without
being French
26
. As a result, the Civil Code of 1803 adopted a citizenship model that was based on
blood (jus sanguinis), inherited like a family name and transmitted through paternity. Nationality was
thus a right attached to a person, attributed at birth, maintained despite migrations elsewhere, and it
was necessarily gendered — inherited through fathers and husbands, which is to say belonging solely
to men. As Patrick Weil puts is, “Nationality is a matter of law,
27
” but it is also a “matter of policy.
28
”
During the nineteenth century, France experienced increased immigration for a host of
reasons including economic crises in Europe, religious persecution, wars, and revolutions. However,
for the French-born children of immigrants and foreign-born men considering naturalization, the
reintroduction of the military draft in 1818 proved a powerful deterrent, causing many would-be
Frenchmen to apply for legal residency, which did not subject them to military service. As a result, the
Nationality law of 1889 reintroduced jus soli, which focused on socialization and French education
rather than blood. Throughout this time period, two major changes in naturalization law produced

26
From Jean-François Berdah’s Citizenship and National Identity in France from the French Revolution to the Present.
Pisa University Press. Edizioni Plus, pp.374, 2006 : “The first Constitution adopted in September 1791 did not
differ fundamentally from the old laws, except that naturalization became a common, automatic and permanent
right (at least until 1795 and the new Constitution) which allowed thousands of foreigners living in France to
benefit from French nationality after a five year period or if they married a French woman. The fact that
Revolutionary France was facing a future conflict with neighbouring countries was not irrelevant to that
decision since the new citizens were instantly requested to enlist in the French army. This situation prevailed
until 1794 for all foreigners who arrived in France and the vast majority of those becoming new French citizens,
even without their consent. Naturalization then stopped being automatic and was conferred following the 21st
birthday of the new candidates on personal request.”
27
Weil 2
28
Weil 3
27
immediate population “growth”: adopting jus soli and naturalizing Jewish Algerians en masse by the
Crémieux Decree of 1870. These two events were not simply demographic strategies meant to inflate
population numbers: naturalizing “foreigners” served an ideological purpose as well, strengthening
morale and obedience to France—both of which were thought to have been reasons for defeat by the
Prussians
29
.
Before and around World War I, depopulation was a major concern for France, and
subsequently, nationality was used as an instrument of demographic policy. As such, a law passed in
1927 which made French nationality much more accessible through naturalization or marriage. At the
time, French women were increasingly marrying more foreigners, particularly after the First World
War. Between 1803 and the Law of 1927, women born and raised in France who married a foreigner
automatically had the nationality of her husband, and in the case of divorce were subjected to the
national laws of her husband. Essentially, women were “made foreign” by marrying a foreign man.
The nationality of French woman was thus contingent upon the man in her life: her father or her
husband.
For Algerian Muslims, too, nationality was subject to contingencies and devoid of full rights.
In the particular example of Algeria, France’s settler colony, considered an extension of the hexagon
and incorporated into three governmental départements, the politics and history of naturalization
showcases the veritable hierarchy of nationality. For Algerian Muslims, who were naturalized as
French subjects, nationality did not ensure the same rights as citizens, though they were officially
counted as part of the French population. Though it was technically possible for an Algerian Muslim

29
For more, see Gosnell, The Politics of Frenchness in Colonial Algeria.
28
to request full citizenship by undergoing a naturalization process, the cases in which this was granted
were few and far between.
In Weil’s analysis, each development in nationality law came to the detriment of specific
groups of people. The Civil Code of 1803
30
created a nationality that was seen as a right that would be
attached to a person at birth that could not be lost by residing elsewhere. This right was transmissible
through parentage (jus sanguinis). However, this right was reserved for men, thus to the detriment of women
who, up to that point, retained the right to be naturalized. The Law of 1889 initiated the reintroduction
of jus soli, naturalizing the descendants of immigrants, including the legitimacy of double jus soli, where
the grandchildren of immigrants (if their parents were born on French soil, including Algeria). The
children of immigrants were granted nationality at the age of majority if they still resided in France,
which proved to be to the detriment of Algerian Muslims. The law of 1889 extended nationality to
non-French European settlers in Algeria as well. This model of integration intended to rely upon a
societal approach, applied to everyone in France and Algeria, with the exception of Muslims, who
would have to undergo a naturalization process. Lastly, the Law of 1927, considered to be an
instrument in demographic policy, made nationality available on a massive scale to immigrants who
desired to undergo naturalization. However, naturalized people were not given the right to vote or to
exercise political rights and were prevented from exercising certain professions, usually during a period
for up to ten years. This law thus appeared to be detrimental to naturalized people. Throughout these
three periods, France sought to codify Frenchness into law.

30
The Civil Code of 1803 is also referred to as the Napoleonic Code after 1804, when Napoléon becomes
emperor.
29
Transformations of Naturalization Law: The Civil Code of 1803 and the Law of 1889
Until the French Revolution, there existed no explicit legal definition designating who was to be
considered French. The Ancien Régime divided people into two primary categories: français and aubain
(alien). Aubains were any non-naturalized people or strangers. The droit d’aubain granted to the French
king rights of inheritance (right of escheat) of any aubain who died in his kingdom. In other words,
aubains were incapable of posthumous bequeathing because any progeny of theirs was not seen as
legitimately French, and thus without a French heir, the kingdom became the beneficiary. Until the
reign of François I (1515-1574), children who were born abroad to French parents were also aubains
and could not inherit from their parents. Under François I, a lettre de naturalité from the king could be
procured in order to naturalize people under such conditions
31
. The motivation behind the droit
d’aubain was primarily monetary: wealth should remain in the kingdom. In this way, citizenship or
naturalization was more about proving allegiance to the king and keeping wealth within the kingdom.
Until the establishment of jus soli (Parliament de Paris, 23 February 1515), one was considered French
if three conditions were met: 1) one was born in France, 2) to French parents, and 3) one resides in
France. However, by the end of the century, parentage was recognized as the primary mode conferring
the qualité de français and the place of birth was no longer a determining factor.
A benchmark decision in the Parisian Parliament on 7 September 1576, known as the Mabile
Decision, for the first time formally recognized a foreign-born child of French parents who settled in
France as French. Marie Mabile descended from two Huguenot parents who took refuge in England,
married an Englishman in England, and after the death of her husband, returned to France as a widow.
In France, she obtained a lettre de naturalité and sued for the inheritance of her maternal grandmother’s

31
Though not a tremendous amount of lettres de naturalité were given: about 6000 were granted between 1660-
1789 (about 45 per year).
30
estate. Her lawyers argued that technically the letter hadn’t been necessary but was proof of her desire
to settle permanently in France. As a resident of France and a descendant of French parents, these
two factors were enough to allow her to be considered French
32
. Thus, she was able to inherit her
family fortune as a legally entitled French national. According to the court’s decision, the fact that
Mabile had settled permanently in France showed her “spirit of return” (esprit de retour) and accepted
her naturalization under the condition that she agreed to give up all inherited possessions to the king
if she ever were to leave. According to historian Peter Sahlins, the Mabile decision thus challenged jus
soli and ensured the rights of women to be naturalized
33
, revealing jus sanguinis and residency in the
kingdom as two factors of tangible allegiance to the king. For the Ancien Régime, the most salient aspect
of naturalization was being born and living in the kingdom of France. Thus, children born in France
to foreign parents did not require lettres de naturalité, whereas children born abroad to French parents
would often request one in order to guarantee their privilege to inherit.
In 1790, the first revolutionaries broke with the previous royal policies of inheritance (right of
escheat
34
) and the lettres de naturalité. For the first time, nationality was defined in law by a constitution
and could be applied in a consistent fashion. The Constitution of 3 September 1791 maintains that
the qualité de français is granted to those 1) born in France to a French father, 2) born in France to a
foreign father but residing permanently in France, and 3) those born in foreign country to a French
father who have returned to settle permanently in France. Defining nationality in law was intended to
eliminate certain inequalities among people living in France. To this end, citizenship was extended to

32
See Peter Sahlins. Unnaturally French Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After. Cornell University Press, 2004,
p 61.
33
Under the Ancien Régime, foreign woman could request nationality via lettre de naturalité. Likewise, French
woman could retain their French nationality when marrying a foreigner. Women lost the right to be naturalized
entirely under the Civil Code of 1803 and French women marrying foreigners lost their French nationality for
that of their husband.
34
Escheat is a common law doctrine that stipulates that property of an heirless person who is to be transferred
to the state posthumously.
31
the Jewish population and forms of serfdom and slavery were abolished. Under the law of 1790 and
the constitutions of 1791 and 1793, foreign women were naturalized on the same basis as men. By the
Constitutions of 1795 and 1799, foreign women could declare domicile in France with the right to be
naturalized after a seven to ten years residency. Likewise, foreign women marrying French men were
automatically considered French (unless considered “suspect”) and a French woman marrying a
foreigner conferred her citizenship to her husband after a one-year waiting period.
However, the tides were turning, especially for the rights of women, as nationality reverted to
earlier forms of jus sanguinis under the Civil Code of 1803. The Code reestablished the state’s power
over foreigners in two ways: by the right of escheat
35
(inheritance) and admission to legal residency.
At this time, nationality disappeared from the Constitution and jus sanguinis took the place of jus soli.
Thus, only a child born to a French father was legally French. Henceforth, the children of immigrants
born in France were no longer automatically French and would have one year in which they could
request French nationality after the age of majority (then, twenty-one). As Jean-François Berdah
explains,
When the Civil Code came into force in March 1803, the definition of a Frenchman had
totally changed compared with previous periods, revolutionary or not. Over the next
eighty years, any individual born from foreign parents could claim French citizenship if
he was at least 21 years old and declared his will to become a Frenchman and to settle in
France. But for those immigrants who wanted to establish themselves in France, a ten-
year period was necessary before applying for naturalization. This was a clear departure
from the ‘right of soil’ since lineage was meant to be an exclusive criterion.
36

Immigrants born outside of France would have to undergo a naturalization process. Ultimately the
Civil Code established what was seen as a reinterpretation of Roman law, which treats the nation as

35
Right of Escheat was abolished on 14 July 1819.
36
Jean-François Berdah. Citizenship and National Identity in France from the French Revolution to the Present. Pisa
University Press. Edizioni Plus, pp.374, 2006, trans. Steven G. Ellis, Gudmundur Halfdanarsonet Ann
Katherine Isaacs.

32
the political extension of the family. In this view, a nation-family must transmit nationality in the same
way that families do with names: by parentage.
This constituted a considerable step backwards for women’s rights, breaking with legal
traditions established by the Ancien Régime and the Revolutionaries. Under the new code, a married
woman became a dependent of her husband in terms of civil law. During the Council of State’s
discussion on the section “On Marriage,” Napoleon Bonaparte declared that a wife is the husband’s
property:
elle appartient à celui-ci comme l’arbre à fruit appartient au jardinier…la nature…a fait
de nos femmes nos esclaves ! Le mari a le droit de dire à sa femme : Madame, vous ne
sortirez pas. Madame, vous n’irez pas à la comédie. Madame, vous ne verrez pas telle ou
telle personne ! C’est-à-dire : Madame, vous m’appartenez corps et âme
37
.
The nationality of women was made contingent upon the men in her life: her father (as a minor) and
her husband (when and if married). Under such circumstances, a French woman marrying a foreigner
became a foreigner. If widowed, she could regain her nationality through petition and permanent
residence. If divorced, she would maintain her husband’s nationality. However, a foreign woman
marrying a Frenchman became French. Only men transferred nationality to children. Foreign women
could no longer be naturalized altogether, with an exception through marriage
38
.
In addition to these new conditions, the Civil Code introduced an alternative to naturalization
that many foreigners opted for: legal residency. The application process to legal residency required
much less time and money than that of naturalization, which was a powerful incentive. Moreover, the

37
Quoted in René Cassin, “L’inégalité entre l’homme et la femme dans la legislation civile,” Annales de la faculté
de droit d’Aix, new series, no.3 (Marseille, 1919), 1-28, P.18. Translation: “nature—has made our women our
slaves! The husband has the right to say to his wife: Madame, you shall not go out. Madame, you shall not go
to the theater. Madame, you shall not see such and such a person! That is to say: Madame, you belong to me
body and soul.”
38
Until the Law of December 1849, which reopened naturalization to foreign women.
33
status of a legal resident did not include the obligation to fulfil military service, unlike the status of
French nationals. For this reason, many foreign men applied for legal residency, particularly after the
reinstatement of the draft in 1818 with the Gouvion-Saint-Cyr law. Legal residency, or admission to
residency, proved a better option for the lower classes because there were fewer fees attached to this
status than that of naturalization. It was also particularly advantageous because it was not subject to
the draft policy, which allowed for drafted persons to pay for a substitute to appear in their place.
Without the means to pay for such a substitution, conscription was required. This was also the reason
for which the French-born sons of immigrants opted for legal residency instead of naturalization at
the age of majority. Ultimately, the status fell out of use in 1889 and fully disappeared after the Law
of 1927.
Corsican-born Napoléon Bonaparte, who was the acting First Consul of France in 1803,
initially supported jus soli because he saw nothing but benefits in the extension of French civil laws
throughout the empire. Though he ceded to the decision to institute jus sanguinis, as emperor, he added
a provision in 1809 that forbade Frenchmen from obtaining unauthorized naturalizations abroad, also
known as the principle de l’allégeance perpétuelle
39
. The idea was to prevent Frenchmen from abandoning
their military service, or worse, joining enemy troops. Through the expansion of Napoléon’s empire,
the number of French departments reached its pinnacle of 130 states by 1812 and men from these
territories were heavily recruited for military campaigns. The law of 14 October 1814 guaranteed that
people born in these territories would have the right to remain French under the condition that they
had resided in France for ten years. The law of 17 February 1815 required imperial soldiers to become
naturalized citizens in order for them to receive their military pensions. Between 1815 and 1849, the
vast majority (85%) of naturalizations were these two kinds of cases. After 1849, naturalization

39
Removed from law in 1889.
34
reforms required a two-step process which made it even more unappealing and expensive, which is to
say unsuccessful, ultimately causing naturalization numbers to drop even lower. The new process
necessitated an initial “admission to residency,” proceeded by a ten-year waiting period, after which,
the naturalization process could begin. Applicants were required to pay expensive fees for both of
these governmental authorizations. Admission to residency remained the preferred choice for a
number of reasons: it was not subjected to draft requirements; it was inexpensive; and it did not require
a lengthy waiting period.
Under the Civil Code of 1803, the French-born sons of foreigners were not legally French at
birth and were given the choice to apply for naturalization at the age of majority. Due to the factors
outlined above, this option was often declined. The French-born sons of immigrants were counted in
the population and were thus part of the conscription pool; however, if they were chosen, they were
able to get out of it by declining their French nationality. This created a scandal among many French
regional governments, which eventually led to the Law of February 1851 which allowed for double jus
soli, meaning the grandchildren of immigrants were considered French at birth. However, a provision
was still included for repudiating French nationality at the age of majority, which many elected in order
to avoid military service. Following France’s defeat by the Prussians and the territorial loss of Alsace,
the Law of 16 December 1874 announced that one could no longer renounce French nationality unless
one could prove one’s citizenship of another country: this was often difficult, given the hostility
between European countries at the time, as well as the technological insufficiencies that impeded
communication with and receipt of documents from foreign governments that were needed for
verification. Between 1873 and 1896, France fell into an economic depression largely as a result of
switching to the gold standard, which led to a decline in prices and in profits, massive layoffs, and
recruitment of inexpensive foreign labor, especially in the agricultural sector. In response, France
35
experienced mounting xenophobia, demands for immigration control, particularly in right-wing circles
that campaigned in favor of protections for the national workforce. At the same time, the State
responded to depopulation, declining birthrates among French citizens, and the loss of Alsace along
with its 1.5 million inhabitants, with policies that reflected this demographic anxiety. By the mid-
nineteenth century, Minister of Justice Adolphe Crémieux instituted a policy for the naturalization of
political refugees and foreign workers. Moreover, by 1891, the law of 1889 was amended to recognize
a child’s ability to take nationality from mothers. The reinterpretation of the law signaled a step
forward for the rights of women, who were previously excluded from it, based on the technicality that
étranger was gendered masculine. Étranger was henceforth interpreted to include women because it
seemed illogical that French women who married foreign men (i.e. were made “foreign”) could not
pass French nationality onto their children.
Naturalization in French Algeria: 1830-1889
The French colonization of Algeria began in 1830 with the bloody siege and eventual
annexation of Algeria in 1834. Beginning in 1830 with the Treaty of Capitulation, signed by the Dey,
France had originally granted freedom of religion to the “indigènes,” to be governed according to special
and distinctive status depending on whether they were Jewish or Muslim. But they were definitively
not considered to be French. By 1834, with the annexation of Algeria, Muslim and Jewish inhabitants
were declared French subjects, a status that conferred limited rights and prevented them from
obtaining nationality in any way. It was deemed “impossible” for Muslims to be naturalized simply
because it couldn’t take place without overturning Koranic civil laws. Likewise, the Minister of War
rejected Jewish naturalization on the basis that it would be a mistake to give a “demeaned and scorned
population” what they would not give to Muslims. To the French government, both Talmudic law
36
and Koranic law were initially considered their own system of law based on religious codes
40
that
superseded French civil law.
As the colonial power, the French introduced measures that would alter the allocation of lands
and properties drastically. After the conquest, two sorts of land existed: private properties and
collective tribal lands, which were non-transferable or could be rented. In response to the annexation,
troops of indigenous soldiers led by Abd el-Kader revolted against the French. In 1839, Abd el-
Kader’s troops massacred Europeans in the Mitidja Plains, which led to the confiscation of Sahel and
Mitidja lands by the French. Following the ordonnances of 1844 and 1846, all uncultivated lands (rich
tribal lands around Algiers, Bône, and Oran) and lands to which no tribe could produce property
titles
41
were declared ownerless and became state property. After years of fighting, in 1847 Abd el-
Kader surrendered and by 1857, the French state had definitively conquered Kabylia and lands
previously occupied by vanquished tribes. Only the least fertile land remained used by indigenous
farmers. In July of 1865, the first naturalization of an Algerian Muslim man, Mohammed Ben Hacem,
was carried out by the Senatus-Consulate exceptionally at the request of the Minister of War due to
his “superiority over most of the native officers.”
42
The Senatus-Consulate, created 14 July 1865 by
Napoleon III as part of his “Arab Kingdom” policy allowed “indigènes” to request naturalization, and
permitted foreigners residing there for at least three years to request naturalization. Naturalization
status would be granted to an applicant via an official decree of the Council of State, pending an

40
France (and French-Algeria by extension) follows a civil law system, meaning a series of legal codes based on
the Roman legal tradition. Religious legal systems derive from traditional religious texts, including Islamic Sharia
and Jewish Talmudic and Rabbinical law. For more, see Kent Greenawalt, “Religious Law and Civil Law: Using
Secular Law to Assure Observance of Practices with Religious Significance.” Southern California Law Review, vol.
71, no. 4, University of Southern California, May 1998.
41
Property titles did not exist in Algerian society, which made it opportune for the French to confiscate it. Land
in pre-French Algeria were tribal and collectively owned. See Weil pp. 212-214.
42
Weil 209
37
investigation. Thus, the “non-French” people of Algeria (Jewish, Muslim, European) were allowed to
request naturalization for the first time.
Following Napoleon III’s defeat at Sedan and the fall of the Empire after the Franco-Prussian
War (1870-71), fear of instability in Algeria, exacerbated by the belief that the Prussians would attempt
to interfere and agitate the Muslim population against France, caused the French government to
integrate Algeria administratively into metropolitan France. Algeria was divided into three departments
(Oran, Algiers, Constantine) to be led by civil governor generals, who would report to the Minister of
the Interior. The Crémieux Decree of 24 October 1870 instituted the National Defense government
in Algeria after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. One of those seven decrees conferred
nationality to the northern indigenous Jewish population of Algeria, abrogating the Senatus-consulate.
Historian Benjamin Stora analyzes the Crémieux decree as an important step in Jewish assimilation,
43

which began as early as 1834 when French authorities removed power from rabbinical courts, who
decided penal judgements on conflicts between Jewish Algerians including marriages, divorces, or
religion. By 1841, the rabbinical courts had lost all juridical power to the French courts. Ten years
later, in 1851, a law passed regarding transmissions of property, which allowed the French courts to
control the sale of all lands, except between Muslims. During Napoleon III’s trip to Algeria in May
1865, he received a petition signed by ten thousand Jewish Algerians demanding collective
naturalization. In 1870, collective naturalization became a reality under the Crémieux decree, named
after Adolphe Crémieux, Minister of Justice and president of the Universal Israelite Alliance, who had
made nearly twenty trips to Algeria over the years and had been well-acquainted with the politically
mobilized Jewish people in Algeria. The legal assimilation of Jewish Algerians enlarged the French
population by 35,000 new citizens, endowing them with both civil and political rights such as the right

43
For more, see Benjamin Stora, Les trois exils: juifs d’Algérie. Paris: Stock, 2006.

38
to vote. The decree was carried out against the will of the colonial administration and many colonials,
for fear of Jewish representation by vote. After the legislative elections of July 1871 veered left, the
regional government of Thiers proposed a failed bill to revoke the Crémieux Decree. Thus, the decree
provoked opposition in both metropolitan France and French Algeria.
By December 1870, the colonial civil authority was given power over tribal territories formerly
governed and under the protection of military authorities, thus the Muslim population was effectively
in the hands of the colonials, who were far more brutal and disdainful of them than the Napoleonic
armies. Napoleon III was considered a protector by the Muslims and they feared that his defeat in the
Franco-Prussian War would mean that they would lose all tribal lands to the colonials or the colonial
civil authority. Though there were few Algerian Muslims who sympathized with the colonists and
chose to be naturalized, they were looked down upon by their co-religionaries and referred to as
M’tournis (renegades, turncoats): assimilation was discouraged and largely prevented, in contrast to the
incorporation of the Jewish population of Algeria. As a result of the civil assumption of tribal
territories, in March 1871, there was a massive revolt in Kabylia that lasted six months, which benefited
greatly from the defeat by Prussia and the subsequent disorganization of power in France.
The 1871 Kabylia Insurrection led to the seizure of 1.1 million acres of the best tribal lands
when the leader of the insurrection, Mohamed Mokrani was killed by French troops and Kabylia was
subjugated. Shortly thereafter, the Warnier Law of 1873 ended the traditional practice of joint
ownership of lands. A year later, drafts of what would eventually become the Code de l’indigénat became
the subject of heated discussions among colonial administrators. By 1881, the Code was implemented.
This Code was essentially a list of infractions specific to the native population, which made the
following things illegal: to leave the territory without an official travel permit; to commit a disrespectful
act; to insult an agent of authority; and finally, to make a complaint or demand known to be inaccurate
39
or repeated to the same authority after it had been resolved according to regulations. These Codes
were punishable by sequestration, by fine, or by prison sentence. The Code de l’indigénat was officially
dismantled between 1944 and 1947.
Following the Crémieux Decree of 1870, there was significant pressure from the non-French
European settlers of Algeria for naturalization. European settlers worried how the enfranchisement
of Jewish Algerians might affect elections and, consequently, antisemitism in Algeria surged as a result.
Governor General of French Algeria Louis Tirman spoke in 1884 about demographic anxiety
surrounding a shrinking French population compared to the growing foreign and indigenous
populations. In his view, the only solution was to naturalize “foreigners” of European descent
(including Italian, Spanish, Maltese, German) many of whom had been in Algeria for generations. In
addition to the demographic pressure to naturalize was the fear that the increasing populations of
Spanish or Italian people in Algeria might jeopardize France’s sovereignty.
With the introduction of the Law of 1889, the state sought to redefine the boundary of French
and foreign in terms of socialization as opposed to a hereditary approach. A policy of double jus soli
was formally recognized, meaning that the grandchildren of immigrants were naturalized citizens
immigrants at the age of majority, if they continued to reside in France. This law applied to both
France and Algeria, meaning that it made it possible for non-French European settlers to have French
nationality and attributed it automatically to their children. Jewish Algerians were naturalized en masse
with the 1870 Crémieux decree. However, at the request of colonial representatives of Algeria, the law
of 1889 did not apply to Muslims. To become fully French, Muslims were obliged have to submit
applications to the Senatus-consulate. However, the law of 1889 fundamentally changed how French
territory was viewed: People born in Algeria, as an administrative part of France since the 1870s, were
officially recognized as having been born on French territory, which becomes increasingly important
40
nearly a century later, when immigration and citizenship, particularly for Algerians and French people
of Algerian descent, dominate political debates.
Early Twentieth-Century: Eugenics, Depopulation, and Scientific Racism
By the end of the nineteenth century, the Law of 1889 marked the return of jus soli and France
stood as the top country in Europe for immigration. Still, the French-born children of immigrants
rarely requested nationality at the age of majority, though it was their right to do so. For this reason,
the foreign population increased independently of migration trends.
One significant reason for this was the marriage of French woman to foreign men. Between
1900-1926 more than 190,000 French women became foreign through marriage
44
, meaning that the
French-born women made-foreign amounted to 6.5% of the total foreign population in France. In
the 1920s alone, 150,000 French women living in France lost their nationality because of this.
International marriages became more common, particularly after WWI, where many French young
men died, which resulted in a recruitment of foreign labor, as economies in eastern Europe and Italy
plummeted, and thus, an influx of immigration to France. The Law of 1927 changed this: French and
foreign women were given the choice to keep their nationality or to adopt their husband’s nationality
upon marriage. The law was considered a double success, both for Populationists and for Feminists.
However, French women still did not have the right to vote: it just made it so that they could give
birth to Frenchmen who would eventually be able to vote. This law essentially reintegrated
Frenchwomen who married foreign men (and were thus no longer considered French), back into the
official French population count.

44
Weil 200
41
Another factor that affected the immigrant population in France was labor immigration.
Algeria provided a stream of male laborers throughout the 1920s due to the labor shortages and
increase of industrial work in France. The economic prospects of France provided a much-needed
incentive for Algerians struggling in the colonial system. By 1924, the number of Algerian workers
rose to the 100,000 mark, which became an annual figure until the Second World War. This first “âge”
or stage of Algerian emigration to mainland France, as termed by Abdelmalek Sayad, caused a certain
amount of anxiety amongst French officials. Campaigns to malign and oversee these Algerian workers
were established, including welfare programs whose aim was to dissuade workers from sympathizing
with a growing Algerian Nationalist movement. The first of such movements was established in
France in 1926 as the Étoile nord-africaine, under the leadership of Messali Hadj. French authorities, and
most specifically colonial administrators, feared that the migrant workers, who were considered
politically naïve and intellectually inferior, would be swayed by the promises of Communists or
Algerian Nationalists. In order to combat this, a propaganda campaign by the French state was waged
against Algerian men in particular, in which they were depicted as criminals and sexual harassers.
As a method to detract from what was considered “undesirable” immigration, naturalizations
based on practices of “scientific” racism were introduced, pertaining to the question of blood
45
, or in
other words, racism sustained and justified by “science.” One of the leading French experts on
immigration, Dr. René Martial, considered a “racist expert,” took particular influence from the
American method of immigration – which, at that time, involved the inspection of individual
immigrants at designated ports of entry, such as Ellis Island. The American method involved selection
by ethnic or national origin (even within the so-called “white race”) through a system of quotas.
Though France did not officially adopt the American system of national or ethnic quotas for

45
For more about eugenics and racial science, see Chapter Two of this dissertation.
42
immigration, this racial framework was most certainly of interest for scientists and consultants for
government officials. What is most interesting is the way in which this discourse medicalizes the
nation: the nation is a body, and its health is of utmost concern. Part of maintaining the health of the
national body is to purify and protect from foreign contamination.
The racial science movement, including eugenics, paved the way for Vichy’s nativist policies
and the subsequent belief in a hierarchy of assimilable races. After the Armistice and arrival of the
Germans in June 1940, the French Eugenics Society
46
, founded in 1912, halted all activity. However,
the Vichy government did go on to pass a premarital screening law in 1942, a law that required all
pregnant women to undergo screenings for tuberculosis and venereal disease and paid out bonuses
for breast-feeding mothers. The certificat prénuptial law outlasted the Vichy regime that passed it, finding
its duress into the twenty-first century, enduring in the French Constitution until it was finally repealed
in 2008. Eugenics crossed over into debates on immigration via the work of the French Eugenics
Society’s 1934 President, Eugène Apart, who viewed immigration as a top priority of eugenics.
Likewise, Dr. René Martial, a veteran of colonial Morocco and a physician, was preoccupied by the
diseases he believed originated in colonial immigrants. He argued that that the health of the nation
was endangered by immigration and thus must be subject to close restrictions and controls.

46
In France, the eugenics movement was comparatively smaller and never managed to become a mainstream
issue
46
. However, the prestige of the members composing the French Eugenics Society did exercise substantial
influence on French society of the early twentieth century. Leading members of the Eugenics Society included:
Nobel Prize winner Charles Richet; the chief statistician of the French Government’s Statistique Générale,
Lucien March; Edmond Perrier, the head of the Natural History Museum from 1900-1920; Eugène Apart, the
president of the French Pediatric Society; Adolphe Pinard, member of the Académie Française and National
Assembly deputy from 1918-1928. In the first part of the century, the group sponsored eugenics legislation,
conferences, lectures, and free university courses in order to garner attention and influence upon potential
academic and political allies.
43
Martial’s “scientific approach” to immigration asserted the French “race” was like any race,
which Martial defined in the following terms:
On appelle race, l’ensemble d’une population dont les caractères psychologiques latents
ou manifestes (langue en particulier) et les traits anthropo-biologiques constituent dans
le temps (histoire) une unité distincte.
47

Martial upheld findings that displayed the certainty of affinity through bloodlines, and thus supported
a policy which would seek to limit immigration in order to prevent compromising the “French race”
via racial mixing. Patrick Weil astutely asserts: “In this view immigration is like a horticultural graft; it
has the same effect on a people as blood transfusions have on individuals.
48
” Following this logic,
transplants are only successful when they are not rejected or incompatible to the biochemistry of the
host—or in other words, some elements are more assimilable than others. In 1933, when the
purported “science” suggested that Jewish Poles and Jewish Germans “biochemical compatibility”
was close to their non-Jewish counterparts, it was bad ideological news for Martial and the proponents
of scientific racism. In response, Martial proposed an exclusion based on psychology rather than
biology, based on the undesirable “psychology” of the Semitic race, who he described as unstable and
marked by “l’agitation anxieuse et jamais apaisée.”
49
By 1942, Martial definitively proclaimed that, “en
définitive, c’est la psychologie qui caractérise races ou peuples.”
50

Another leading “expert” on immigration for the French government, Georges Mauco studied
categories of “desirability,” particularly among foreign workers and refugees. Given that the vast
majority of refugees from 1933 on were Jewish people fleeing Germany, Austria, and Poland, the
framework for Vichy’s racial registers had been laid out well before the arrival of the Nazis by the

47
René Martial, “Le problème de l’immigration,” Mercure de France, 15 avril 1935, p.267-294. Also quoted in
René Martial’s Les Métis, Flammarion, 1942, p.87.
48
Weil 75
49
Les métis, p.88
50
Les métis, p.87
44
advent of scientific racism in the early twentieth century. By numbers alone, Vichy naturalization
policy looks the following way: 15,154 denaturalizations; 446 withdrawals of French nationality; and
110,000 Jewish Algerians denaturalized from 1940-1943. Though the foundation may have been laid
by the previous findings of racist scientists, the question of how these policies were put into practice
remains. To begin to try to comprehend the how, one must begin with the “legal” recourse, bit by bit.
Shortly after the siege of Paris in June 1940, drafts of a bill circulated which would essentially
revoke citizenship from anyone who had left France without government authorization between 20
May and 30 June 1940, in the months before and after the arrival of the Germans. This law, completed
in February 23 1941, took inspiration from Nazi law, specifically the second section of the Nazi law
of 14 July 1933, which stipulated that all naturalizations during the Weimar Republic (Fall of Germany
on 9 November 1918 [Armistice Day] up to Hitler’s coup) could be revoked if they didn’t fit standards
of “desirability” (i.e. Jewish). The French law of 23 February 1941 enabled the deprivation of
nationality intended to punish and degrade members of the Resistance (“dissidents”). This included
famous figures like Charles De Gaulle, René Cassin, Pierre Mendès-France. Under this law,
“Dissidents” had property confiscated, liquidated, deposited in the Secours National (National Aid
Bank). In short, Vichy’s naturalization plan sought to correct past “errors” of naturalization by
establishing a new French nationality code, which would restrict new naturalizations and create new
legislation for naturalization.
Reformists fell into three primary categories: 1) “Restructionists” who wanted a more rigorous
approach to nationality and entry into the national territory, meaning closer control over who was to
become French. They were in favor of disallowing criminals and delinquents from naturalization,
viewed Jewish people with suspicion, and saw national and ethnic origins as one criterion among others for
evaluating the possibility of assimilation. They believed that each application should be assessed
45
individually; 2) “Racists”, or “racialists,” who, like their scientific racist predecessors, believed
naturalization should be decided strictly based on racial, ethnic, and religious origin; and 3) “Liberals”
who held preference for a policy of openness in nationality and immigration. Restrictionists proposed
reforms for first-generation Jewish immigrants and their children, second-generation Jewish
immigrants, and foreign women marrying Frenchmen. Ultimately, the Nazi Government decided that
the reform proposed by Vichy seemed to reverse the 1927 Law that facilitated naturalizations in order
to boost French population numbers. However, the Germans insisted that provisions must be added
to specifically address Jewish and Gaullist denaturalization. Ultimately the Vichy Code was buried by
the Germans and never took effect.
Though the Vichy Code outlined above did not pass, widespread suspension and interruption
of naturalization processes did take place. On July 1
st
, 1941, Joseph Barthélemy suspended all
registration for nationality of Jewish children born in France to foreign parents. Between June 1940
and February 1941, decisions on naturalization and reintegration (mainly for French women who
became non-French by marrying foreigners) were interrupted. Between 1940 and 1944, General Pétain
granted only a few hundred naturalizations per year, with caution exercised for Italian and German
applicants specifically because of the ongoing war with these countries. In 1941, a decision was made
to consider Jewish naturalizations completely separately from all others, and the Commissariat-
Général for Jewish Affairs was created and led by Xavier Vallat, who was henceforth consulted on all
requests for naturalization by members of the “Jewish race” and each case was individually subject to
veto by him. The loi du 22 juillet 1940 granted the Vichy government the right to review all
naturalizations granted since the Law of 1927 aimed at naturalized citizens from a country with which
46
France was at war and who were suspected of disloyalty
51
. This law made it easier to withdraw
nationality without justification, unlike previous laws which had explicit causes: Any foreigner who
had become French since 1927 could lose his or her nationality owing to a decision made simply by
an administrative fiat. Previous withdrawals afforded the opportunity to contest the decision in court,
but Vichy law gave no recourse. The law applied not only to those born in another country, but also
to children born in France to foreign parents and to those French by marriage, amounting to 900,000
people total. Likewise, the law could apply to the wife and children of any concerned party (even a
Frenchwoman who married a foreigner and their children)
From this law came the Commission for the Review of Naturalizations, created September
21
st
, 1940. The purpose of this Commission was to review cases of naturalization, post-Law of 1927,
and essentially, to undo the work of the left-wing Popular Front. The Commission for the Review of
Naturalizations reviewed, tallied, and handled Jewish cases separately with nearly always a negative
result, concluding that the cases to be “of no national interest.” On August 10
th
, 1940, the Minister
of the Interior requested from all prefects the names of naturalized persons who have committed a
crime or who have manifested opinions or acted in ways against “national interest” (such as Resistance
or Communist sympathies), which would make a person eligible for denaturalization. Italians made
up the greatest number of such withdrawals. As for the Jewish population of Metropolitan France,
cases continued to be individually reviewed rather than collectively denaturalized, in contrast to
Algeria. Vichy in Algeria enacted antisemitic measures that did not take place in Metropolitan France,
including a numerus clausus, or quota system, which deprived Jewish tradesmen of their ability to

51
Similar laws existed in the US since 1906, the UK since 1914, and France in 1915 and 1917 [until the Law of
1927]. The UK kept the law after 1918 to withdraw naturalizations for failure to reside in the British Empire
for more than 7 years, 12 months in prison, fine of at least one hundred pounds, “acts of a political nature”,
lack of loyalty, connivance with an enemy during a war, remaining a subject of a state that was at war with Great
Britain.
47
practice, and removed all Jewish children from state schools and moved them into Jewish-only
schools. Most significant of such measures was the abrogation of the Crémieux Decree, which
denaturalized en masse the Jewish Algerian population between 1940 and 1943. Jewish Algerians were
stripped of their civil and political rights, as they no longer had French citizenship, notwithstanding
the fact that they did not hold any citizenship at all. Though the Pétain government certainly
considered an en masse denaturalization of the Jewish population in Metropolitan France, ultimately
this never occurred. Pétain opted to continue the process of reviewing individual cases by committee
52
,
though the rate of denaturalization remained at seventy-eight percent.
Les trente glorieuses : Reconstruction, Decolonization, and Family Regroupment
The physical and architectural devastation of France during the Second World War required a
steady influx of immigrant and foreign labor in order to rebuild France which lacked an adequate
domestic labor force. In particular, the field of construction was in dire need of higher workforce
numbers: numerous modernization initiatives and building projects were ultimately completed by the
main d’oeuvre of foreign labor. Due to the overall necessity for reconstruction in Northwestern
European countries, there was a great need for semiskilled and unskilled international labor in
reconstruction efforts. Likewise, shortages in metallurgy were met by foreign labor, who worked in
factories, aiding the economic reconstruction of France as well.
The 1947 Statut d’Algérie granted provisional citizenship to Algerian men living in metropolitan
France, officially titled Français-musulmans d’Algérie. We note that their official status was a subcategory
based on an ethnic designation: French-Muslim “subject” (français musulman) rather than French

52
Pope Pius XII conveys in 1943 via Monseigneur Chappouli that he worries for “Pétain’s soul” if he were to
make it possible to denaturalize Jewish nationals en masse to be deported by the Germans.
48
“citizen” (français). The statute likewise provided somewhat unregulated passage between the two
countries, which fortified a one-way trajectory by which the French workforce was replenished, as
many Algerian men were willing and able to come to France because of the relative lack of opportunity
in the colony. At this point, a greater number of Algerian migrants of Arab origin started to emigrate
to France, whereas during the earlier part of the century, the majority was of Kabyle Berber descent.
The new emigres had fewer ties to metropolitan France at this stage and less established networks of
support. It was also at this time that émigré families began to arrive in France together.
Sociologist of immigration, Abdelmalek Sayad, points out that this postwar immigration was
not the first mass migration from Algeria to France: it was in fact the second “âge” of Algerian
emigration to France
53
which lasted from the postwar era until the 1970s. The first stage took place
before 1945, when a vastly male constituency of Algerian workers entered the industrial workforce in
the fields of mining, metallurgy, and factory work in France. This wave of Algerian emigration was
thought to be temporary, as the earnings made in the metropole were often saved in order to send
back to impoverished communities in Algeria. The lack of opportunity for Algerian workers can be
seen as “generative”: colonization provided the necessary conditions for such immigration. The
cultural and economic changes of capital (as theorized by Sayad’s mentor Pierre Bourdieu), imposed
by the colonial regime on the traditional, precolonial structure of Algerian society, created the
conditions under which the Algerian proletariat had only one option, as collective, formerly tribal
lands were now owned by the French state: move to the city or move to France.
This first stage of Algerian emigration to France, which took place during the first half of the
twentieth century, consisted of mainly Algerian men (with a higher proportion of Kabyle Berbers)

53
“Les trois âges de l’émigration algérienne en France” 1977
49
who settled without their families and sent their wages back to Algeria. The Algerian Nationalist
movement came into being in the 1920s and found resonance during and after World War Two,
galvanized by the German occupation of France, which inspired Algerian Nationalists to reject the
French colonial presence.
After the surrender of the Nazis on May 8
th
, 1945, what began as celebrations escalated into
two major massacres in the towns of Guelma and Sétif in Algeria. In Sétif, gunfire was exchanged
between police and a crowd of five-thousand civilians, many of whom were anticolonial protesters,
resulting in a number of deaths, although the exact number is unknown and disputed by historians.
In Guelma, a protest by the former Messali Hadj-led ENA nationalist group, known as the PPA, or
the Parti du Peuple Algérien, was violently quashed by French authorities. In retaliation, rural towns in
the area were attacked, both upon European settlers and Muslim communities. The reprisals carried
out by the French army were remarkably disproportionate: they included torture, bombings, summary
executions, and destruction of villages. The massacres were a turning point in French-Algerian
relations and are regarded as one of the main catalysts to the Algerian war.
Before and after 1945, the looming political threat to the colonial order, personified by
Communists and Algerian Nationalists, resulted in the creation of political control and networks of
surveillance for the Algerian workers in France by the French government. This kind of exceptional
treatment was anything but exceptional for Algerians living in the colonial territory. As France’s settler
colony, Algeria was an intrinsic part of France between 1870, the year of departmentalization, when
Algeria went from military control to administrative governmental control, ruled by the Ministry of
50
the Interior
54
, and 1962, the year of the Evian Accords. The population of Algeria between those years
underwent various naturalizations, as mentioned above, starting with the 1870 Crémieux decree, which
bestowed French citizenship on Jewish Algerians en masse and next, in 1889, when non-French
Europeans were naturalized as French citizens. Muslim and Berber Algerians were considered subjects
in the colonial hierarchy and were thus subjected to the Code de l’indigénat, which included punishments
for disrespecting a French person and for unpermitted travel until 1947. The Code was dismantled
between the years 1944 and 1947, which provided a provisional “citizenship” for Muslim Algerians.
The Code was weakened by three major acts: the ordonnance du 7 mai 1944 which brought to an end
summary punishment statutes, and provided an opportunity to choose to be naturalized as French “à
titre personnel” for those who were able to fit designated criteria and were willing to give up their rights
to native or Muslim courts. This form of à titre personnel was non-transmissible to family members or
spouses. Secondly, the Loi Lamine Guèye du 7 avril 1946 formally extended citizenship across the French
colonial empire. Lastly, the Loi du 20 septembre 1947 eliminated the two-tier court system of separate
French and Muslim courts and required equal access to public employment, resulting in an increasing
number of Muslim Algerian workers in France.
The foremost postwar immigration policy was the Ordonnance du 2 novembre 1945
55
, which
regulated the entry visas for all foreigners and foreign workers, and remained the central governing
apparatus over foreign labor and immigration until the 1980s. As part of the regulatory apparatus of
the law, the Office national de l’immigration (ONI) was created specifically to manage foreign labor.
Because of their status as citizens, Algerian workers were not required to go through the ONI, and

54
As opposed to Morocco and Tunisia, who, as protectorates rather than colonies, were ruled by the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs.
55
Ordonnance n°. 45-2658 du 2 Novembre 1945, relative à l’entrée et au séjour des étrangers en France.
51
were thus not subject to its regulations. For other foreign workers, employers were required to file
with the ONI and formally request a foreign laborer, who would be selected by the ONI to fit the job
criteria. Foreigners who wished to find work were likewise required to perform a number of
preliminary tasks, including procuring a government-approved sponsor, a permis de residence from the
Ministry of the Interior and a permis de travail from the Ministry of Labor. Under these stipulations,
becoming a foreign laborer in France proved to be a time-consuming and complicated bureaucratic
process. Nonetheless, for Algerian workers who were able to bypass this triage by avoiding the
controls of the ONI, the process was simpler, and thus many more men, bound by economic necessity,
were recruited for both seasonal and permanent work in France. Subsequently, between the years of
1949 and 1955, approximately 180,000 Algerian Muslims settled in France.
France experienced a labor shortage due to a number of factors, however, the leading reasons
were an increase of the average educational level and an increase in the length of compulsory military
service due to Algerian War conscriptions
56
. Geographer and specialist of European labor migrations,
James R. McDonald quite dryly notes:
At a certain point, the educational levels, living standards and aspirations of most North
Europeans had risen to the point where numerous job categories were widely abandoned
as too menial, too poorly paid, or otherwise unrewarding. This abandonment did not
mean, however, that jobs could go unperformed, and so the Southern Europeans and
Africans, to whom any job is still better than none, have arrived in increasing numbers
57
.

Consequently, labor immigration became a necessity and a steady stream of foreign workers
arrived in France well into the 1960s. Algerian men made up a large part of this workforce because
they were able to travel between Algeria and France without needing the work visas that foreign

56
James R. McDonald, “Labor Immigration in France, 1946-1965.” Annals of the Association of American
Geographers, vol. 59, no. 1, 1969, pp. 116-134.
57
McDonald 117
52
laborers required for entry. Many employers subsequently were able to hire needed men on the spot.
In 1956, in response to these informal hiring practices, French authorities attempted to formalize rules
for companies who sought to hire foreign workers who had arrived by their own means, thus hoping
to favor Spanish or Italian workers by virtue of their country’s proximity to France. The attempt to
stem North African, but particularly Algerian, immigration was a response to the brewing xenophobic
attitudes towards North Africans during the Algerian War. Throughout the years of the independence
struggle, Algerian immigration continued steadily, reaching its highest point of wartime immigration
in 1958.
Around the same time, Italian immigration hit its apex in the postwar decade, reaching around
80,000 workers in 1957. Throughout the 1950s, Italian immigrants made up a large percentage of the
permanent foreign workforce, particularly in the agricultural sector. Political and economic instability
caused many Italian workers to immigrate to their relatively prosperous neighboring country of
France. Italian immigration capped off around 1958 after the country found its economic footing
with northern Piedmontese manufacturing industries. Additionally, German industry started to recruit
Italian labor with better wages and working conditions. At that time, France turned its recruitment
efforts first towards Spanish and, later, Portuguese laborers in the early to mid-1960s. Italian, Spanish,
and Portuguese groups made up over eighty percent of ONI controlled permanent immigrants during
the postwar years
58
.
The official data concerning migration to and from Algeria is plagued by its own kind of
inconsistencies. Though Algeria was, at the time, the only country for which France recorded net
migration on a regular basis, their methods were quite rudimentary. The figures were ultimately based

58
McDonald 118
53
on air and sea travel, which did not distinguish between tourism, business, studies, or laborers
59
. The
recorded data was sorted into categories of “men” and “woman and children”, and furthermore
“European” and “Musulman,” which leaves a lot of ambiguity in terms of accurate figures
60
.
Nonetheless, between the postwar period through the 1960s, the relative ability of Algerian workers
to travel to France, albeit with poor conditions on overcrowded boats, was facilitated by Algeria’s
initial status of colony and, after Independence, through stipulations made in the Evian Accords. In
her study of demographic movements between Algeria and France
61
, Muriel Cohen notes the
significance of the conditions of travel and arrival in France, though technically, “movement” between
the two countries was permitted:

De 1947 jusqu'à la guerre d'indépendance, se rendre d'Algérie en métropole ne pose pas
de problème administratif. Néanmoins, le voyage est éprouvant pour les primo-migrants,
adultes comme enfants. La plupart des témoins citent de mémoire le jour exact de leur
arrivée en France, signe qu'il s'agit pour eux d'une étape décisive dans leur vie, au même
titre que la naissance ou le mariage.
62

As Cohen notes, migration isn’t just a question of administration and policy—it is also an
experience that affects and influences the person who migrates—echoing Abdelmalek Sayad. The
affective dimension of migration is often marked by an intimate encounter with discrimination.
Cohen’s study emphasizes the link between discriminatory housing and the ability of Algerians to
settle permanently in France, particularly as families. Before the creation of the certificats de residence,
there was no requirement for an official document to prove one’s housing in France: a passport or an
Algerian i.d. card was the only requirement to legally exercise one’s right to reside (droit de séjour) in

59
McDonald 119
60
McDonald 125
61
Cohen, Muriel. “Les Circulations Entre France Et Algérie : Un Nouveau Regard Sur Les Migrants
(Post)Coloniaux (1945–1985).” French Politics, Culture & Society, vol. 34, no. 2, 2016, pp. 78–100. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/44504224.
62
Cohen 81
54
France. After the certificate became a legal requirement, Algerians living in France who were not able
to obtain the certificate—for various reasons, one of which being that the municipal authorities did
not recognize the bidonvilles as approved housing—were essentially stuck in France, because they risked
not being let back in if they were to leave. According to Cohen, throughout the twentieth century,
Algerian migrants underwent many important changes according to their status (statut) in the French
colonial hierarchy. Cohen remarks that, while Algerian migration was largely hindered during the
interwar period, starting in 1947, Algerian men and women (though technically women were not
considered citizens until 1958) were given the status of “FMA” (Français Musulman d’Algérie), which
allowed them to travel between Algeria and France. However, as the movement for Algerian
independence intensified, France sought to restrict movement between the countries by changing the
documentation necessary for travel. In 1956, “FMAs” working in metropolitan France who sought to
travel back to Algeria were required to obtain an official “autorisation de voyage en Algérie” from a
préfecture, who would determine that the person seeking to travel to Algeria was not going in order to
join the “maquis
63
”.

Travel from Algeria to France was likewise regulated by a new requirement for government
approved housing. Due to the systemic abuse of foreign laborers by the French state, bidonvilles— a
rudimentary kind of shantytown with deplorable conditions, including no running water, mud
flooring, and little to no insulation at all, which proved fatal during the tough winters of the period—
were often the only option for housing, particularly for Algerian families. The largest community of
Algerians in bidonvilles was found in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre, which provided fertile ground
for Algerian Nationalism. Because of this association with Algerian Nationalist groups, like the FLN

63
The term maquis refers to the Nationalist Struggle.
55
(Front de libération nationale) and the MNA
64
(Mouvement nationale algérien), the people living in bidonvilles
were often subjected to police surveillance. While the housing crisis was well underway throughout
the 1960s, particularly for Algerian families who fled to France to escape wartime violence and
reprisals, the bidonvilles were likewise the primary target of new legal requirements, for two primary
reasons: the French administration, the bidonvilles both “symbolized Algerian marginalization” and
“were considered FLN hideouts” but most significantly, the housing requirement prevented family
reunification.
65
. The squalid, terrible conditions of the bidonvilles were not recognized as suitable
housing (though alternatives did not exist) and importantly, because they had no addresses or official
street names, the administration could not justify providing a certificate of housing for people living
there.
After Algerian independence, France and Algeria negotiated as two sovereign nations about the
future of migrations between the two countries. Initially, the agreements following Independence,
known as the Evian Accords, stipulated that Algerians who were able to produce an Algerian
identification document were able to enter France and legally exercise their right of residence (droit
de séjour)
66
. The countries agreed on conditions that would allow for free movement between the
countries. In theory, this was intended to facilitate the transition for pieds-noirs who would potentially
lose business contacts without this mobility. However, the primary migratory flows were coming from

64
The exploited Algerian laborers were moreover often manipulated by the FLN (Front de Liberation
National), whose members used taxation and violence as a way to force Algerian workers to fund FLN
activities both in France and on the ground in Algeria. The money collected in mainland France from
sympathizers, members, and “taxes” – taken from almost all Algerians living in France, for reasons ranging
from protection to infractions on a ban on French products like alcohol and tobacco.
65
Cette mesure s'inscrit dans une nouvelle politique de lutte contre les bidonvilles algériens, qui symbolisent
la marginalisation des Algériens, et sont considérés comme des refuges pour le FLN. Mais, dans le contexte
de grave crise du logement qui sévit en métropole, c'est aussi une façon d'empêcher l'immigration familiale.
(Cohen 80)
66
Unlike Algerians, arrivals from all other nations were required to have a “carte de séjour” visa to exercise
the droit de séjour.
56
Algeria to France. The mass repatriation of the so-called “pieds-noirs”, or the European population of
Algeria, following independence saw the arrival in France of nearly 900,000 migrants within a few
short months in 1962. The government lacked preparation for the new arrivals and subsequently, the
rates of unemployment and housing insecurity were rampant among the pieds-noirs. The situation was
exponentially worse for the Harkis, who were systematically segregated in rural camps, where many
of the officials in charge came directly from colonial offices. Harkis were doubly discriminated against
by both the French/ pieds-noirs and by Algerian nationalist and their sympathizers, who saw the Harkis
as traitors
67
. Across the board, a housing crisis was underway in metropolitan France.
The migration of the pieds noirs (European Algerians) to France pushed the French authorities
to renegotiate the terms of the Evian Accords. The Nekkache-Grandval agreements (10 avril 1964)
reinstated freedom of movement for certain categories of migrants: contracted workers currently
employed in France, businessmen registered with the “register du commerce”, government agents.
However, new documentation was required for those seeking to enter France as tourists, “new
workers”, and “familles primo-arrivantes”—families seeking reunification with a member, generally a
husband or father, who migrated to France ahead of them. Algerians seeking to work in France (“new
workers”) were henceforth required to obtain a medical certificat, un certificat médical délivré par l'Office
national de l'immigration français (ONI) and a work certificate, un certificat du nouvel Office de la main d'œuvre
algérienne (ONAMO). The “primo-arrivé” workers, arriving in France for the first time, were required
to produce a certificat de logement, which had very strict requirements—including a requirement that the
rent of their housing cost at least 15% of their salary.

67
See Claire Eldridge. From Empire to Exile: History and Memory Within the Pied-Noir and Harki Communities, 1962-
2012. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.
57
After Houari Boumediene took power in 1965, Franco-Algerian negotiations took yet another
turn in terms of migratory politics. France implemented increasingly strict regulations of both entry
(Algeria—France) and departures (France—Algeria) with the intention of pressuring the Algerian
government to curb emigration. In order to prevent tourists from fraudulently entering France with
the intention of staying and working in France, the French government instituted a new policy that
required Algerian tourists to provide proof of a return flight and “sufficient resources” for a holiday
in France: 200 francs per person, then 500 francs per person, after 1965. Additionally, the French
authorities put weekly caps on the number of tourists who were allowed entry to France from Algeria:
in 1966, only 250 Algerian tourists were allowed entry every week. The Algerian government, for their
part, also tried to discourage emigration by requiring those seeking to emigrate to produce a visa from
the ONAMO in 1963, and later, in 1965, by implementing a requirement for an autorisation de sortie au
territoire algérien. However, by 1968, yet another important change was put into effect, which made it
significantly more difficult for Algerians to migrate to France. The Accords du 27 décembre 1968 sought
to get the “séjour des Algériens” in France under control. The agreements set two novel conditions on
Algerian migration: a cap of 35 000 workers, selected by ONAMO, each year; and the creation of
certificat de résidence, the equivalent of “carte de séjour” for other foreigners. By 1973, the Algerian
government put an end to emigration to France, and similarly, in July 1974, the French government
suspended labor immigration. From the late-70s to the early-80s, tourists and families were the only
category of traveler legally allowed entry into France from Algeria.
By 1965, it is estimated that over 500,000 Algerian nationals settled in France. Family
reunifications were a significant source of immigration and brought many more woman and children
to France, which greatly helped ease the alienation of Algerian workers in France, and was thought by
the government to help such beneficiaries integrate into French society. Such family migrations
58
increased throughout the sixties and seventies, hitting a peak between 1971 and 1974, at which time
the practice of mass labor immigration was suspended in July 1974 by President Valéry Giscard
d’Estaing. Historians commonly suggest that les trente glorieuses ended with the economic recession and
the oil crisis of 1973. As France grappled with its floundering economy, a new political party was
formed by a former French army officer, Jean-Marie Le Pen, called The Front National, or the FN.
The FN focused on what was becoming an increasingly commonplace, though erroneous, belief at
the time: French unemployment and economic recession was a result of mass immigration from
Algeria. Immigration, which was generally considered an economic issue, began to take on the
appearance of a cultural issue.
Far Right and the Front National
68
: Immigration goes mainstream
The party known as the Front National originally coalesced a number of unsavory right-wing
factions that, because of their extremist and violent tactics, were officially banned from French politics.
One such group, Occident, was forced to dissolve in 1968 because of its violent practices against mostly
student-led left-wing organizations. Its members soon thereafter regrouped under the name Ordre
Nouveau (ON) and drew members from other far-right organizations (Action Nationaliste, Une Jeune
Europe), ultimately comprising around five thousand members in the following years. Though
ultimately quite unsuccessful in municipal elections across the board, the group gained traction
following the distribution of its manifesto, entitled “Pour un Front National” in June 1971. The
document laid out their fundamental political platform as a belief in the “natural order” – tradition,
xenophobia, and antisemitism. By June of 1972, the ON rebranded itself as Front National pour une
Unité Française (FNUF) and entered the political arena as an official party.

68
For a more detailed account of far-right movements, refer to Chapter Four.
59
In order to clean up its image and establish itself as a legitimate political party, FNUF
appointed controversial figure and veteran of the Algerian War, Jean-Marie Le Pen as its first president
because of his political experience as a former deputy of the Assemblée National and campaign
manager of the 1965 presidential campaign of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour. The party further
rebranded itself as the Front National on 5 October 1972. The FN recruited members from fringe
groups including Poujadists, neo-fascists, anti-Gaullists, right-wing intellectuals and activists
69
.
Conceptualizing themselves as defenders of French identity, the FN advocated right-wing policies to
expand the private sector while shrinking governmental intervention and promoted anti-immigrant
xenophobia including an attempt to revert back to jus sanguinis in order to denaturalize first- and
second-generation Algerians in France.
During the legislative elections of 4 March 1973, the FN failed to secure much electoral
success. As a result, inter-factional disputes arose between Le Pen’s supporters and former ON
members, who advocated militant activism. Ultimately, Le Pen managed to seize control of the party
after the ON was officially banned from French politics after a meeting on 21 June 1973 entitled
“Halte à l’immigration sauvage” inspired the group to commit an armed assault on the Communist League
in Paris. The FN lost the majority of its ON base, which went on to create the radical right-wing Parti
des Forces Nouvelles (PFN). In their place, the FN attempted to recruit national socialists and Catholic
fundamentalists but remained on the fringes of French politics throughout the remaining decade with
very little support for their racist, anti-democratic, anti-communist rhetoric.
However, the FN found some resonance in the sociopolitical climate of the 1980s, after
François Mitterrand was elected in 1981. Anxiety surrounding the idea of “national security” and

69
Betz and Immerfall 1998: 12; Bourseiller1991: 78–83; Soudais 1996: 184–187. See Stockemer p. 11.
60
insécurité (“law and order”) found a place in public discourse via the FN. Immigration policy was
likewise expanded: Mitterrand’s government had put an end to Giscard d’Estaing’s “forced returns”
of immigrants, facilitated family reunifications, and made accommodations for religious pluralism,
particularly for Islam. The emergence of Islam as a major religion in France was not well-received by
conservatives and Catholic fundamentalists. Islam was, and to a certain extent remains, associated with
North African immigration, particularly from Algeria. By 1982, immigration from North Africa
constituted 38.5% of all immigration to France
70
. From that point forward, the FN based its political
platform on national security and immigration, claiming a correlation between immigrants and crime,
ghettoization, unemployment, and economic crises.
The Front National saw its two greatest electoral successes in 2002 and 2015—dates which
happen to coincide with major acts of radical Islamic terrorism: 9/11 with the entry of Le Pen Sr. in
the second round of presidential elections against Jacques Chirac; and following the Paris attacks of
November 2015, the entry of Marine Le Pen in round two of the presidentielles against Emmanuel
Macron. The staunch anti-immigration and anti-Islamic policies and attitudes of the FN were likely a
factor in motivating right-wing voters to support the party against perceived threats posed by Muslim
immigration (the party’s appeal will be discussed in more depth in Chapter Four). If anything, the
greatest historical ‘success’ of the FN’s entry into politics has been the permanent fixture of
immigration in mainstream political policy. Immigration, particularly as an issue of national identity,
has been a consistent focus on the political radar since the party saw its first major electoral successes
in the 1983 municipal elections, when Le Pen Sr. was appointed municipal councilor of the 20
th

Arrondissement of Paris. The electoral success in the town of Dreux propelled the FN towards the
mainstream, with hopes of attaining legitimacy as a right-wing party like any other. Le Pen became a

70
Weil 1991: 374–375

61
regular fixture in the French media, often due to his purposefully provocative, openly antisemitic,
racist, homophobic rhetoric, though the FN was far from being the only party taking positions on
immigration at the time.
Towards the end of the trente glorieuses, Algerian immigration entered what Abdelmalek Sayad
calls its ‘third stage,’ wherein settling permanently became a desirable goal. In terms of housing, there
were significant shortages for Algerians, the preference for state housing going to repatriated pieds-
noirs, European immigrants, and metropolitan French. The bidonvilles were finally demolished in 1977
and the construction of cités de transit had been underway beginning in the 1960s. These cités de transit
were considered intermediary housing before permitting Algerians to be placed in council housing. At
the same time, policing and surveillance of the Algerian population in France intensified, and it was
often the case that former colonial police and welfare officers were hired to watch over the Algerian
population, which, unsurprisingly, perpetuated their colonial attitudes and biases. French society
became increasingly segregated along ethnoreligious lines as beneficiaries of family regroupment were
subjected to strict, discriminatory criteria in order to join their spouse or children to live in France.
Henceforth, the framework for conceptualizing immigration in France has been in terms of
‘generations.’

Throughout the 1980s, media began to focus on depictions of the ‘Second-Generation,’ that
is, the children of migrants—who were assumed to be of a certain age based on the timeframe in
which their parents would have migrated: during the 1970s, at the height of family regroupment. This
framework presented the image of a youthful generation posing problems for French society. The
most pervasive and damaging of such misconceptions was that members the Second Generation were
stereotypically young, male, and unemployed délinquants, loitering on the streets or engaging in criminal
62
activities, while the daughters were cloistered in the home, unseen by the public, submissive to their
brothers and fathers, assumed to be oppressed and abused. In response to this ethnoracial
discrimination and stereotyping, Algerian communities in France initiated social movements that
would expose the racism they experienced. The main problem of the Second Generation was that they
were French: they had French nationality, full citizenship via double jus soli, yet they felt absolutely
unseen. Antiracist movements emerged around 1983, when the Beurs (the ‘verlan’ slang of ‘Arab’) put
forth an alternative form of belonging, enabling them to assert both Frenchness and North
Africanness. At the same time, Berber communities in France pushed for more openness in the
definition of Algerianness that is not linked to Islam, particularly in light of the Algerian Civil War of
the 1990s.

Around this time too, the Harkis, the Algerians who fought on the side of the French army
during the Algerian War of Independence, exposed the deep ambivalence of the French state for its
former colony. After the Evian Accords, General de Gaulle attempted to block Harkis from coming
to France, although they were promised exactly that. Eventually, the Harkis did escape Algeria, where
they were the target of a murderous campaign of violence, however the welcome was not very
hospitable. For the years following their immigration, the Harkis remained in rural camps located deep
in the French countryside, where integration and assimilation were prevented because the camps were
in secluded areas. These camps were run by former colonial officers and bureaucrats so the Harkis
and their families experienced colonial-style discrimination and segregation. The Harkis faced the
added challenge of being completely rejected as traitors by Algerian nationalists and isolated from
other Algerians with whom they shared a common culture.
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Understanding that every migratory movement entails not just an immigration to, but an
emigration from, Sayad’s studies of Algerian emigration to France reposition the narrative away from
the Eurocentric understanding of immigration. The émigré is presented as a complex subject, who, by
virtue of emigrating, leaves a culture behind: the people, stories, languages that are now absent, as they
have been left in the country of origin. Emigrés are subject to a double absence, a placelessness,
wherein he or she is neither here (the country of origin) nor there (the country of emigration). Sayad
enacts a re-centering of the migration experience: his work provides a much needed, helpful
intervention in the “immigrant as guest” narrative—the immigrant was often recruited; moreover,
they had no choice economically other than to relocate to France. A migrant is both away from his or
her society of origin and distanced psychologically, physically, and culturally from the so-called “host”
society. Sayad presents real cases, interviews, and stories that contradict and complicate the
stereotypical portrait of immigrants of that era. The deep ambivalence on the part of French society
on whether or not to accept, welcome, and recognize themselves in the figure of the ‘immigrant,’
speaks to a similar current identified by Rosello in today’s understanding of immigration in Postcolonial
Hospitality: Immigrant as Guest. Often the target of suspicions and mistrust, the ‘immigrant’ of the
twenty-first century—which is to say, the stereotype of a common immigrant— is often politically
disconnected from the real-world hardship of the immigrant experience. As noted in Rosello’s
Postcolonial Hospitality, anti-immigration platforms have their mainstay in the belief that many people
‘choose’ to come to France in order to abuse its social welfare programs and ‘liberal’ amnesty laws.
The suspicion is that refugees and immigrants are ‘faking’ it, laughing at ‘us’ for letting them take
advantage. In other words, “the real refugee must be innocent, powerless, a victim.
71
” The expectation

71
Rosello 156
64
is for refugees to be perfect examples, innocent, and most importantly, that they must stay in their
“place”.
The demonization of immigration intensified around the time of the 1973 oil crisis, when the
prosperity of the trente glorieuses came crashing down, causing a recession and large-scale
unemployment. Public opinion largely held the mistaken notion that immigration and unemployment
were two sides of the same coin and, to a large extent, immigration policies reflected an anxiety around
having to accept more people into the country during an economic recession. As President (1974-
1981), Valéry Giscard d’Estaing attempted to close France’s borders to reduce the immigrant
population, though ultimately, his plan backfired somewhat— closing the borders to labor
immigration actually had the effect of causing more widespread permanent settlement. In 1977,
voluntary returns were introduced, but were also unsuccessful, drawing more interest from European
immigrants than North African immigrants, who were the intended target of the policy. New
legislation known as the Loi Bonnet was introduced in 1981 which increased the state’s ability to
deport immigrants without papers, which permeated the atmosphere with xenophobia and racism and
made immigration a top priority in the 1981 Presidential election. The victory of the socialist candidate
François Mitterrand (1981-1995) symbolized hope and the possibility of change for many of the
disillusioned, yet as time went on, it became clear that the victory was indeed only symbolic. Left-wing
voters felt disappointment and let down by the broken campaign promises, including withdrawing the
right to vote of documented immigrants in municipal elections. Mitterrand did end the practice of
repatriation payments and expulsions during his presidency, although he maintained that immigration
must slow down. His solution—which scandalized many, but most significantly, conservatives—was
to ‘regularize’ nearly one-hundred thousand unemployed immigrants, furnishing them with work and
residency permits, within the first two years of his presidency. During his presidency, the French state
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experienced a period of what is referred to as ‘cohabitation’ between right and left-wing parties in the
different factions of government sharing power, and it was at this time that some of the most
repressive and restrictive laws on immigration and on citizenship were drawn up. Both sides agreed
that immigration was in dire need of reform. The FN began to see its first electoral successes in
municipal elections at this time.
Additional restrictive reforms were initiated under the right-wing “cohabitation” government
led by Prime Minister Chirac from 1986 to 1988. Under Chirac, the state adopted strict measures of
expulsion and restrictions on the visa system, known as the Pasqua laws, the first of which appeared
in 1986. The first Pasqua law of 1986 facilitated expulsion procedures and restricted access to 10-year
permits. An increased preoccupation with border security and a fear of fundamentalist Islamic
terrorism in the summer of 1986 brought a current of insécurité after a series of bombs were detonated
in public places in Paris and in response, the government suspended bilateral treaties with West
African and Sub-Saharan African countries that allowed citizens of those countries to enter France
without visas, which initially also applied to North America and European nationals, however soon
after, it no longer applied to ‘developed’ nations. Part of the anxiety around border control was a result
of France’s adherence to the Schengen treaty, which created a policy of open borders between
European nations. In addition to the various European treaties of the 90s, including Maastricht and
Schengen, there were also social upheavals, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Bosnian War, which,
through shifting borders, created confusion among existing nations and new independent ones.
During the cohabitation government under PM Édouard Balladur (1993-1995), whose policy of
immigration zéro along with the second Pasqua law, intended to scale back immigrant rights and impede
their ability to settle in the country in the long term. Likewise, it became more difficult for French-
born children of foreigners to obtain citizenship than before and easier to deport undocumented
66
foreigners. It also increased the waiting period for family reunifications to two years and made it no
longer possible for the foreign spouse of a French citizen with irregular status to become regularized.
Contradictions within the Pasqua laws created a new category of immigrant: the sans papier. The sans-
papier movement of 1996 came out of the situation of West African immigrants who were not
‘regularizable,’ nor were they able to be deported because of the Pasqua Laws—they were not
‘illegal’—they simply did not have papers. The movement gained support and attention after the
occupation of Saint-Bernard church in Paris when the French National Police violently broke up the
protest in full riot gear in 1996. The Pasqua and the 1997 Debré laws were intended to control the
entry of African people into France as well as the status of the French-born children of irregular
immigrants. The criteria outlined in the Debré law stipulated that the French-born child under the age
of sixteen of foreigners would have to prove that he or she had resided continuously for ten years in
France before being able to obtain a one-year residency permit. It also enabled the state to confiscate
passports of irregular migrants and to collect and store the fingerprints of people applying for
residency permits. The state allowed greater police powers, particularly of surveillance, and was able
to streamline its immigration process in terms of ‘development’ rather than ethnic or racial quotas,
against universal republican ideology.
Under President Chirac (1995-2002-2007), PM Jospin reversed many of these laws and revised
the nationality code via the Guigou law enacted on the 6
th
of May 1998 which reinstated limited jus soli
conditions, which is how they stand today. At the age of majority (18), the French-born children of
non-citizen foreigners obtains nationality if the child can prove residency for at least five years after
the age of eleven. Subsequently the law of the 26 novembre 2003 introduced what are known as
‘integration’ requirements, which is a specific form of training, conducted at the OFII, during which
immigrants are instructed about the French ‘way’ of life, laïcité, women’s rights, and republican values.
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That same year, the creation of the European Union brought about reforms on family reunification
in order to bring together coherent policies across Europe. As Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy
introduced reforms on the waiting period for family reunification in 2006, increasing the time between
arrival and making the request to twelve to nineteen months for immediate family reunification. This
loi relative à l’immigration et à l’intégration de juillet 2006 also lifted the ban on labor immigration, which
was suspended under Giscard d’Estaing since 1974, under the stipulation that this labor immigration
would not affect job seekers in France— which perpetuates the disproven causal relationship between
immigration and unemployment. However, this new law only applied to certain professions, which
likewise perpetuated job segregation. The measure applied to workers in catering, construction, public
works, seasonal workers, and commercial professions. The catch-phrase of this era was immigration
choisie. Soon after, a new category of visa was created for “compétences et talents” which was a carte de séjour
available to students and higher-level skilled workers. During Sarkozy’s presidency (2007-2012)
Parliament debated and officially accepted in 2011 an amendment to immigration chosie making mastery
of the French language a prerequisite to qualification.
After five years of Sarkozy’s presidency, the FN entered the 2012 presidential elections on a
campaign denouncing ‘globalist elites’ and the ‘puissances d’argent’ which worked only for the rich while
the wages and social rights of the ‘French’ worse. Immigration was only causing tension for the nation
and was ‘proof’ that integration, assimilation, and multiculturalism do not work. The policy introduced
outlined a plan for reducing legal immigration within five years, abolishing droit du sol, practices of
family reunification, and ‘regularization’ of ‘irregular’ (meaning essentially undocumented) migrants.
Additionally, the FN pledged to establish the practice of priorité nationale, which does what it sounds
like it does: establishes a social hierarchy for the ‘French’ whereby they are first in line, so to speak,
for social benefits, jobs, and housing. The RN (formerly the FN) party platform is essentially the same
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today. They have had regional successes and success in European parliament—there are currently
twenty-three RN eurodéputés out of a total of seventy-nine French deputies.
One of the campaign promises made by François Hollande in 2012 included the removal of
the word “race” from the Constitution of the Fifth Republic. Nicolas Sarkozy vehemently opposed
this move, citing that, to do so would be akin to erasing historical racism. After years of administrative
volleying, starting in the National Assembly in 2013, the word was officially removed in 2018. The law
of 18 février 2016 is one of the most recent immigration laws, set forth by Manuel Valls and Bernard
Cazeneuve during François Hollande’s presidency (2012-2017). The law establishes new forms of
naturalization and allows sick foreigners in irregular situations to stay in order to receive health care if
they do not have the means to pay for it in their country of origin. In turn, people in this predicament
are able to become regularized and obtain the right to social benefits in France. For families with
minor children, the law provides securities against deportation and detention. France’s current
president, Emmanuel Macron (2017-), who faced off against FN president Marine Le Pen in the 2017
elections, has implemented his own strategy of poaching FN votes with hardline immigration policies.
In the years following his election, Macron has shifted his immigration policies further to the right,
suggesting that the French welfare state is being abused by migrants who have come to taken
advantage of France’s ‘generosity.’ He has pledged the ‘cleaning up’ of migrant camps, the addition of
a three-month long wait for migrants before they have the right to qualify for medical aid, and the
introduction of a quota system for skilled labor immigration. In his time as Prime Minister, Édouard
Philippe framed the issue in terms of sovereignty.

Within the past two decades, France has had to renegotiate its own borders, both symbolic and
real. The preoccupation with national security, particularly in periods following extremist terror
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attacks, has caused France to regard the foreigner with increasing distrust. Rosello likens this
phenomenon to a fear of parasitism: the imagined contamination of the host (France) by “parasites”
who would latch onto the host until there was nothing left to consume:
In a simultaneous gesture of opening and closing, Europe is currently stressing the
concept of “freedom of movement” within its redefined borders, which means increasing
controls on the outskirts of its new symbolic territory, in a general atmosphere of mistrust
and suspicion that treats all non-Europeans (especially African, Middle Eastern, and Asian
outsiders) as potentially undesirable parasites.
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As I will argue, this logic of parasitism and contamination—or immunologic—prevails in
discourses about national security and immigration, where the space of the national “body” is taken
literally. In Postcolonial Hospitality, Rosello identifies the nation-as-home as the metaphor that forgot it
was a metaphor: I argue that the metaphor of the national body that is, likewise, the metaphor that
“forgot” it was a metaphor. Building off of Ann Laura Stoler’s suggestion that forgetting can be
political, I propose that the literalization of the national body can be politically advantageous for
opponents of immigration, and stretched to its very limits, for proponents of xenophobia, racism, and
genocide.

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Rosello 51
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Chapter Two

Sang pour sang: Deconstructing National Bodies

If a nation is a body, what does it look like and [how] does it feel? To the extent that the nation-state
is oft conceptualized as a national “body”, integral and integrated, pseudo-scientific comparisons of
national “health” or wellness are commonplace. From the Crusades to present day, foreign “presence”
(both in terms of occupation and immigration) has been represented in the common imagination as a
threat to the “integrity” of the national body. The discursive element of this formulation is nothing
new or original, but does indicate something important about the ways in which a certain kind of
science and law can be mobilized in the service of legitimating concepts that may not be scientific or
legal at all.
In this chapter, I turn to Jacques Derrida’s writings on hospitality and inheritance. Of particular
salience to this conversation is his critique of what he terms the theologico-political, or concepts that
efface their theological origins while presenting themselves as secular. In my estimation, blood is one
such theologico-political transmission. By examining the thematics of blood and inheritance as a kind
of transmissibility that presumes absolute filiation, a number of threads are interwoven: citizenship (as
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jus sanguinis), inheritance (tangible and intangible), desirability (eugenics), and assimilability
(immigration).
What is perhaps the gravest example of this pseudo-scientific pretention exists in the field of
eugenics, which saw genocide as its final solution during the Second World War. As “racial hygiene,”
the murderous was passed off as science— an extension of Carl Schmitt’s sovereign exception, which
accords to the sovereign the right to decide, ultimately, who lives and who dies by deciding who
belongs and who does not. Derrida’s deconstruction of sovereignty intervenes precisely at the moment
when sovereignty pretends to be laic. One example—perhaps even the example, in the sense of the
exemplary— of the theologico-political is the notion of sovereignty: the origin of sovereignty being
God, or the sovereign itself. As Derrida explores in his two-year long seminar on the death penalty,
the sovereign state, particularly the one who executes (whether by penalty or by war) in its own name,
is involved in a process of staging the scene of its sovereignty (the power to decide the exception) by
monopolizing the theological (the power over life and death).
jus sanguinis : blood laws
In common law, jus sanguinis is one of the basic principles by which citizenship rights are
automatically accorded. Most countries have citizenship practices that involve both jus sanguinis and its
counterpart, jus soli, which is the right of “soil”. For example, the Fourteenth Amendment of the
United States Constitution includes a citizenship clause that grants automatic citizenship to all children
born on American soil, regardless of the citizenship status of their parent/s. However, children who
are born to Americans outside of US territory are governed by a set of complex statutes, including
marital status and gender-asymmetrical transmission rights. Married couples are protected, regardless
of whether one or both parents are American citizens. However, unmarried couples face different
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conditions, particularly for father-to-child transmission: for a child born outside of the US to an
American Father and a non-American mother, the father must prove paternity by blood relationship
73
.
Legislation is often revelatory of a state’s values, desires, fears, and anxieties at a particular
time. However, it can also be indicative of the subtle ways that a state can use legislature as a tool to
fortify ideological positions. The example given above shows the extent to which a certain kind of jus
sanguinis citizenship can be used in the service of ethnoracial nativism: the supposition being that,
American men who bear children outside of the United States with non-American mothers may
produce non-white children. In this way, legal technology provides exclusionary conditions, under the
guise of as race neutrality and nature.
The asymmetry in terms of the parent’s gender is worth noting as well: the idea that the father
must prove paternity but the American mother in the same position would not seems too hasty. In a
world of various techoscientific methods of insemination and surrogacy, it seems that, as Derrida put
it, the mother too must be seen as a “legal fiction,” as much as the father would.
In a rather obvious way, nationality law produces a body of texts that indicate how the national
body imagines and desires the contours of its own constitution. By deciding what constitutes a
meaningful part of its body as well as what does not, the state exercises a type of power that finds its
origins in a violence that conceals itself as natural. The nation-state is not: it is built. State-formation
is a process, it is not a natural given of existence, although part of the building process is precisely this
making-forget of its origin. When it is a question of what belongs and what does not, it is a project and

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Legislation for foreign-born children born outside of marriage was first codified in the Nationality Act of
1940, ratified: For child born outside USA on or after 11/14/1968 to nonmarried parents, where the father is
a US citizen, the father has to prove paternity before child turns 18 and prove child support. Blood relationship
between father and child has to be proven by “clear and convincing evidence.”

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a process of nation-building, and it’s not a “natural,” tranquil process. As Derrida’s “Force de loi” argues,
alongside Walter Benjamin’s Zur Kritik der Gewalt, the state’s active monopolization of violence is a
residual effect of an originary kind of violence that succeeds insofar as it has the power to make-forget
the initiatory act of repression and violence that inaugurates it.
The legacy endures this originary violence—its remainder and excess constitute the continuing
navigation of its identity, based on what does or does not belong within the body proper. The nation,
insofar as it imagines itself as an integral body, must identify, discriminate, and expel the remainder of
what does not belong, what contaminates, what exceeds the threshold.
The Schmidtian definition of sovereign stipulates:
Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet. [The Sovereign decides the state of
exception]
The sovereign decides über—over, about, but also in excess of—the Ausnahmezustand, which is
both the exceptional circumstances and a state of emergency, which is to say, the sovereign decides
what is both exceptional and what constitutes an emergency. Typically understood and translated as
“the sovereign is he who decides the exception,” there is a little bit left lacking because the word
Ausnahme means more than just exception: it additionally means exemption and exclusion. The word
Zustand (the compound word in German being die Ausnahme + der Zustand) evokes the positionality,
the condition, the state or status, a situation, or a state of things. Thus, the Ausnahmezustand is the
position with regards to the exception, with regards to the exclusion. Much like the French and English
variants of the verb to decide or décider, the Germanic Entscheiden enacts a cut: the Scheidung or the scission
of the decision: quite literally then, the sovereign decides who “makes the cut,” so to speak.
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The perversion of this sovereign principle is most vividly seen in state policies governing the
right to life and death, including the death penalty, involuntary conscriptions and the draft, and eugenic
policies of sterilization and euthanasia. The technoscientific discipline of eugenics, centered around
the narrative of desirable, which is to say, superior blood, as practiced by nation-states, constitutes an
example of the way in which blood is disguised as secular, under the guise of medical technology, in a
way that reveals the theologico-political underpinnings of the discourse of blood that functions to
serve the racial ideology of white supremacy.
I want to focus briefly on the field of eugenics as a manifestation of the state’s theologico-
political sovereignty in France. Of course, there is no way to do this without referring to Britain, where
Sir Water Galton first founded the field; nor California, which provided the model for the German
Rassenhygeine movement. It would be misleading to assert that there is a way to speak about one
particular national context that exists sovereignly in an international field like science, but particularly
the science of race and eugenics.
The driving force behind the eugenics movement was a belief that the quality of each national
“race” was deteriorating due to a long-standing process of degeneration, often attributed to
miscegenation, otherwise known as racial mixing. In 1883, this new “science” was developed primarily
by a man called Sir Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton elaborated upon the
Darwinian concept of ‘survival of the fittest’ in order to suggest that the human race had polluted
itself by compromising the ‘purity’ of its most desirable specimens through breeding in ‘inferior’
characteristics. Racial ‘salvation’, a kind of reconfiguration of the Holy Grail, would only be achieved
through selective breeding practices, ultimately controlled and promoted by the state.
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Throughout England and the United States
74
, birth control movements and eugenics laws had
been in place since the early twentieth century, with the aim of limiting births among “undesirable”
people. Deeply influenced by the British and American models, the German science of eugenics, or
Rassenhygiene [racial hygiene] coincided with pseudo-occult beliefs in the mystical connection between
blood and soil [Blut und Boden], which was to become a slogan for the future Nazi party.
A French interest in selective breeding predates the emergence of eugenics as a scientific field.
Ideas of human perfectibility, along with theories of generation and inheritance, can be seen in
Enlightenment ideals
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. Even the French colonial mission civilisatrice carries the germ of human
perfectibility, though the colonial hierarchy deemed the colonized as less perfectible than their
European counterparts. French proto-eugenics found its footing on conceptions of the natural world
as not only malleable, but as a site capable of forward-moving progress. The French model believed

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In broadest strokes, the British and the Americans were the western countries on the forefront of eugenics.
By the early twentieth century, eugenic policies were put in place in the United States: those who were deemed
“unfit” to procreate were sterilized by force. In 1907, Indiana instituted the world’s first eugenics-based forced
sterilization campaign against the mentally ill. Similar laws appeared across the country, targeting “criminals”
or “degenerate” men and women, however, it was the unfortunate biological fate of women which made them
particularly vulnerable to forced sterilization. With Sir Galton’s goal to breed out ‘poor’ qualities in order to
breed in ‘noble’ ones, the belief was that lower-class women, many of whom were women of color, would
compromise the genetic health of the population. Across the United States, Native American, African
American, Puerto Rican, and Mexican women were sterilized by coercion or by force between 1900 and 1979,
until the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare reformed its policies to require ‘informed consent’
in the sterilization process. Policies to prevent pregnancy were also put into effect, including the banning of
interracial marriages, particularly in the South, and the sterilization of the poor, ‘criminals’, the mentally ill,
alcoholics, epileptics, or those with family histories of such issues. As recently as September 2020, there have
been allegations of forced or coerced sterilization of immigrant women in ICE detainment camps within the
United States.
See https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/9/15/21437805/whistleblower-hysterectomies-nurse-
irwin-ice
Accessed 01/19/21.
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In his Equisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795), the Marquis de Condorcet
suggested that science, language, and technologies are capable of improving the human condition. This idea
was later developed by sociologist Auguste Comte to include a definition of progress in which the needs of the
individual were subordinate to those of the society, prefiguring the main tenet of eugenic logic. The world and
its natural sciences were thus considered capable of improvement and perfectibility.
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that if you can change the conditions, you can change the “blood”— meaning the caliber of the human
being.
Influenced by the Enlightenment naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon, who
described a proto-epigenetics in animals, biologist Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de Lamarck
posited that humanity, like the natural world, was ever-changing due to environmental factors. Unlike
Buffon however, Lamarck considered this movement progressive rather than degenerative, and
believed that the lowest form of organism moves towards complexity according to inner drives and
environmental conditions. This form of positive generation set the foundation for French ‘positive’
eugenics
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.
French eugenics developed at a time when anxieties surrounding the declining birth rate and
depopulation were at an all-time high. Following the loss of the Franco-Prussian war, the state was
gripped by the fear of military and biological degeneration. In response to this perceived decline, the
French eugenics movement grounded itself in the Lamarckian theory of heredity, which promised the
regeneration of a reinvigorated and fortified society through the promotion of desirable traits and
conditions. Unlike other eugenics movements of the day, the Lamarckian theory stipulated that both
in-born and acquired characteristics were hereditary
77
.

76
Briefly put, ‘positive’ eugenics involves promoting environmental improvements to enhance the quality of
populations while also increasing the quantity, whereas ‘negative’ eugenics focuses on eliminating and
preventing the ‘unfit’ from passing on their genetic deficiencies to future generations.
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Essentially, French eugenics posited that environment can stimulate physical changes which are passed onto
subsequent generations. It considered environmental factors, such as alcoholism, venereal disease, tuberculosis,
poor diet, and living conditions to influence the quality of future generations. However, the field assured that
the kind of injuries and amputations inflicted during World War I would not be transmitted to future children,
which left the door open for Freudian psychoanalysis and ‘shell shock’ to explain trauma-related issues and
heredity, which would be attributed to epigenetics a century later.
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German scientists, in particular, studied the American eugenics laws and derived from them their own
theories of racial ‘improvement’. In 1927, German universities introduced the study of racial hygiene
into their curriculum, based largely on the Californian eugenics movement, which had sterilized more
people by 1933 than all other states in the country combined. Germany already had successful
movements promoting similar nationalist, agrarian ideologies, which were of particular importance to
many of the leading men of the National Socialist party. Heinrich Himmler was an ardent follower of
Lebensreform, a movement of ‘life reform’ based on the principals of völkisch spiritualism, embracing the
mystical power of the German countryside and folklore, promoting the axiom of Blut und Boden, the
esoteric connection between German blood and soil.
Blut und Boden was the source of ‘mystical’ power for the German race, according to the Nazi
Race and Resettlement Bureau chief Walther Darre, who saw agriculture as a question of race and
destiny rather than economy.
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During his imprisonment following the Beerhall Putsch (November
8
th
-9
th
of 1923), Adolf Hitler began to read Jorg Lanz’s teachings on racial hierarchy, which propagated
the idea that there were races born to rule and races born to serve. The Nazi regime is quite possibility
the most poignant, murderous example of the theologico-political, not only because their actions were
devastatingly cruel and inhumane, but that they were faith-based—albeit disguised in an immediate
hierarchy of blood, propped up under the name of science and progress.
As a function of its purported sovereignty, the state must decide the limits of membership:
who is a citizen and how one might become a citizen. Welcome and exclusion are discussed as poles

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Himmler was also influenced by Russian mystic and occultist Madame Helena Blavatsky, who believed in the
‘hidden elect’ and wrote of a “great white brotherhood” existing in human form as the Aryan race, composed
of adepts who reached spiritual enlightenment through self-depravation. He took his “blood and soil” belief
from occult “theozoologist” Jorg Lanz, and formed the Order of the New Templars, whose secret purpose was
the purification of the Aryan race (the 5
th
root race in Madame Blavatsky’s occult theory of evolution) in all
areas of the world. Himmler believed he was the reincarnation of 10
th
century Kaiser Wilhelm I of Saxony and
saw his mission as continuation of the Kaiser’s: to form a knightly order, the New Templars.
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of hospitality: Immigration can be seen in this way as the practice, or better, the policy (because
immigration is not a theory) of letting in, welcoming in, which is also the policy of excluding and
expulsing. Immigration (“clandestine” and otherwise) involves a welcome or an exclusion, and in this
way, is related to the discourse of hospitality as conceptualized by several thinkers, including Derrida.
Essential perversibilités : hospitality
During the 1990s up until his death in 2004, Derrida produced a corpus of texts and seminars
that were much more explicitly political than his previous works. His thought turned to democracy,
sovereignty, the death penalty, and hospitalité. During those years, both in France and the United States,
where Derrida had been spending a substantial amount of time, the question of globalization and
immigration became more important than ever before. Important reforms in international law,
commerce, and the renegotiation of borders pushed what was traditionally considered an economic
matter to the forefront: immigration. The 1990s in France saw a number of bills and laws to address
the question of citizenship, rights of asylum, and the possibility of naturalization. Various civil wars
and instabilities across the globe, in countries like former Yugoslavia, Algeria, the former USSR,
produced political refugees who were quite literally fleeing for their lives. The dire situation of political
refugees tipped the scale from the economic angle to the humanitarian. What is the moral obligation
of the corps social in questions of hospitality?
Between the years 1995 and 1996, Derrida conducted a seminar entitled Hostipitalité, in which
he considered a seemingly simple question: qu’est-ce que l’hospitalité ? In the seminar, Derrida draws upon
a few of his greatest hits (Kant, Benjamin, Hegel, and Heidegger), who he reads alongside French
immigration law, reform bills, and current events. In the process, he formalizes the central nerve of
seminar: the double law of hospitality. By converting itself into its contrary, when hospitality becomes
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hostility, hospitality reveals itself as inhospitable. This means, essentially, that hospitality is too
hospitable to its opposite.
Derrida distinguishes between unconditional and conditional hospitality, which are
constitutive of one another. Unconditional hospitality is understood as the opening to the absolute,
incalculable other, without conditions or impositions, whereas conditional hospitality is a form of
exchange that involves some degree of calculation: it has stipulations, conditions, is offered to some
but not all; some are more welcome than others.
The structural possibility of any hospitality, conditional and unconditional alike, is the
proximity of and ease with which it can materialize into hostility, xenophobia, and inhospitality. The
one who arrives as “guest” retains the potentiality to undo and undermine the identity and self-
sameness of the one who receives, or “the host.” There is no stability or reassurance that hospitality
will not degenerate into interrogation or imprisonment for the guest and the host alike. It is not just
the guest who can disrupt, but the host as well. And the precarity of the situation is not to be resolved:
it cannot be.
The law of unconditional hospitality can be understood as an anonymous, absolute welcome
to the absolute other, before any precondition is to be established, before the exchange of any
information including that of names or identifications. Conditional hospitality, on the other hand,
always involves some kind of selectivity: it is not given to just anyone—there is a decision about who is
to receive and who is to be rejected: it is the exercise of the sovereign decision. Unconditional
hospitality would be the absolute welcome of an other whose identity cannot be known, necessarily,
and who very well may threaten or undermine the structure and integrity of the entity we call “home,”
the chez soi.
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Hospitality is a concept and an experience that undoes itself— it auto-deconstructs, which is
to say, it auto-destructs. In trying to protect itself, it autoimmunizes: it deconstructs from within itself.
In order to offer hospitality, even with the most generous intentions, the host has to confirm him or
herself as master of the home. It would be impossible to offer hospitality without reminding the one
being hosted that they are welcome at my home, amongst my belongings. The adage “fais comme chez
toi” exemplifies the limits of the invitation: the guest is meant to hear, make yourself at home—comme
chez toi, as if you were at home, which is essentially a reminder that you are not. In this way, hospitality
comes to a halt—it limits itself, figuratively on the seuil.
In the name of the ideal (and thus impossible) law of unconditional hospitality, conditional
hospitality is practiced and carried out by a nation-state, whereby these laws become integrated in
history, as the history of hospitality—even in the cases where the laws are inhospitable. France of the
1990s was the context in which Derrida addressed the question of hospitality most directly, which was
a time when immigration debates and reforms were in full swing: the Pasqua-Debré laws (1993, 1997,
1998), the growing electoral successes of the National Front, the political questioning of jus soli and
second-generation citizenship, the various antiracist movements, and movements and protests for the
sans-papiers. Inhospitable hospitality laws are inscribed in the history of French hospitality: this
possibility is not coincidental, but constitutes the very nature of hospitality itself. Hospitality is always
at risk of turning to hostility, to inhospitality, and is incapable of offering any guarantees against this
inherent possibility. Which is to say, as Michael Naas puts it: “Vigilance is thus always required,
because things can always get worse.
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”

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Michael Naas, Derrida from now on, 25
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In certain ways, things have gotten worse, if only more overt: there has been a return, a
singular, unique return or revenance of the ghosts of xenophobia, the fears of contamination, the
crossing of the “threshold of tolerance” through a certain kind of “haunting” presence. Derrida has,
in one form or another, worked on ideas of the ghost and inheritance throughout his entire career
until his death, whether as “specter” or “supplement”. Perhaps the most important lesson of all
deconstruction is the knowledge that these figures of hauntology require great vigilance, attention, and
hospitality in order to gesture towards the future, to justice, or the justice-à-venir.
The threshold, as the site of arrival, the potential welcome or rejection, is where the stranger
first meets us or awaits us. The seuil is the scene of hospitality, and in many ways, because of the
abortive, self-deconstructing, contradicting nature of hospitality, it must remain there. Hospitality
becomes the seuil itself. Paralyzed there on the threshold, hospitality undoes itself because of its
proximity to hostility: C’est donc le contraire d’une pure hospitalité, précisément parce que cette hospitalité de droit
est trop hospitalière à son contraire
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.

National Bodies and Specters of Tolerance
In an interview entitled “The Deconstruction of Actuality,
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” Derrida discusses the iterability
of the ghost, explaining the dynamic interactions that take place when, “two memories relaunch each
other [se renflouent]… Always on the brink of all possible contaminations…
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” Using the pseudo-
biological terminology of contamination, memories are revealed as porous entities: never closed and

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20 décembre 1995, p. 5
81
It has been impossible for me to locate this article in its original language, unfortunately, so I will be quoting
from the English translation published in Derrida, Jacques., and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Negotiations :
Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2002.
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“The Deconstruction of Actuality” 107
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constantly interacting with others. They activate in dynamic relation to one another. He takes as
example the commemoration of the tragic Vélodrome d’Hiver roundup of Jewish men, women, and
children in Paris during the Second World War, suggesting that the memory and the urge to remember
Vel d’Hiv can be understood as the interaction of two revenants : the Holocaust and the rise of new
forms of nationalism, xenophobia, and antisemitism. What this means is that it is not a repetition of
the same, it is a repetition that takes place otherwise, a singular repetition, another event entirely: a re-
venant, something that comes back around again differently from its first (or any other) “coming”. The
present retains its relation to the past, it remains its heir, but it is singular, and it must be understood
as affirming rather than simply repeating its inheritance:
This double return is analogous with the identical: “exactly the same thing is happening
again, exactly the same thing.” No: a certain iterability (difference within repetition)
allows for what returns to be another event entirely. The return of a ghost is another
return, every time, on another stage, under new conditions to which one must pay the
greatest attention if one does not want to say or do just anything.
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In this interview, Derrida is prompted to respond to a number of contemporary violences
waged against French hospitality amidst a bipartisan targeting of immigration. In the context of 1993,
when the interview was conducted to accompany the release of Specters of Marx, the interviewer evoked
the ambiguous temporality of deconstruction: the specters but also futuricity, it’s à-venir. Thus, the
deconstruction of actualité, or the double meaning of actuality and current events, of media, in medias
res, and mediation: the actuality of the specific time of the early nineties in France. One of the questions
posed by the interviewer was about the extent to which Derrida felt “surprised” by the moments when
right-wing and left-wing politics reach across the aisle, so to speak, particularly with regards to
immigration.

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“The Deconstruction of Actuality” 108
83
In response to the question, Derrida mentions Jean-Marie Le Pen, who at the time was the
leader of the most vocal anti-immigration political party, the Front National. The FN was founded in
1972 as a coalition of right-wing political leagues, which sought to legitimize into a political force in
order to influence French politics from the inside. Their primary target from day one has been
immigration, specifically African immigration, touting the banner of Les Français d’abord. What Derrida
identifies in Le Pen’s pseudo-biological vocabulary calling for ethnoracial immigration—and by
extension, inaugurating ethnoracial deportation— is a commonality or a resonance with what is being
expressed across the political spectrum. Namely, that the nation is a body: and as a corporeal entity, it
follows a logic of contamination and equilibrium. The nation, as a body, is conditioned by its own
idiosyncratic yet essential, “natural” set of tolerances and intolerances.
Tolerance is not to be confused with hospitality. Tolerance is contrary to hospitality, both
unconditional and conditional. Tolerance comes from above: always originating from a relative place
of power, tolerance is a rehearsal, a phantasm, a performance of sovereignty: I decide to tolerate you only
because I am in the sovereign position of choosing to do so. It is an originary act of violence that, performatively,
reinforces or concretizes existing relations of power. Tolerance says to its object: sure, we can tolerate
you because you are not so noxious to us that we must completely reject you; we are strong enough
to stomach you without needing to destroy you. Tolerance, including religious tolerance, finds itself
deeply imbricated in a theologico-political imperative, as it is practiced, and can only be practiced by
one in a relative place of power. There is no hospitality in pity, in condescension, or in reminding the
other that this is my home and not yours. Such can only be described as tolerance.
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Which makes a quip like President Mitterrand’s about France’s seuil de tolerance
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, threshold of
tolerance, reverberate with considerable significance. Though Mitterrand quickly denounced the
formulation as someone else’s [une expression qui n’est pas la mienne] and as “too vague” to be anything
but suspect [une notion trop vague pour n’être pas suspecte], the use of the word seuil, regardless of whether
it was “his” or not, evokes a specific image: the threshold of a door waiting to be opened or closed.
The seuil or the threshold is the site par excellence of hospitality, and it constitutes the possibility of
welcome, refusal, and moreover, the possibility of having or making room, or being at capacity. The
seuil operates on the logic of hospitality of the body, of the home, and of the nation. It marks the
undecidable boundary and means possibility and impossibility at once. The threshold itself is a kind
of undecidable tolerance that is constituted by the possibility of intolerance.
Yet another French President on the other side of the political spectrum, Jacques Chirac,
infamously commented, around the same time, about the disturbing influence of the “le bruit et l’odeur”
of immigrant neighborhoods (i.e. immigrant homes and bodies) on the French. Like the threshold
(of borders, homes, of bodies), his words, too, echo the logic of tolerance, or better, intolerance: a
French body that cannot tolerate, without disruption, or without significant disturbance. In short, it’s
too much: the limit has been reached, the threshold has been exceeded and crossed. The rhetoric of
tolerance is everywhere in the discourse of hospitality, proffered as a false substitute: tolerance is
hospitality’s theologico-political imposter.

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Mitterrand famously pronounced the words during a televised interview with Antenne 2 and Europe 1 on
December 10
th
, 1989, after one of the journalists asked if he accepts the notion of a seuil de tolérance: est-ce
que vous acceptez, comme une grande majorité de Français, cette notion qu’il y a en fait un seuil de tolérance
? He responded, “Ne me demandez pas mon avis sur le caractère moral, bien que j’aie quelque opinion, mais
le seuil de tolérance a été atteint dès les années 1970 où il y avait déjà 4100000 à 4200000 cartes de séjour à
partir de 1982.” An official transcript of the interview can be found here:
https://www.elysee.fr/front/pdf/elysee-module-7309-fr.pdf

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It has become so commonplace to contextualize various historical moments over the past
forty years (and a number of subsequent current “moments”) as a “crisis,” which draws artificial and
dehistoricized lines of demarcation around the active growing (not a crisis, but something like a tumor)
of xenophobia, but particularly towards Algerians. As a “crisis,” it becomes artificially fixed in time
when, in reality, it is temporally fluid, existing in multiple temporalities. It may not be the same exact
ghost, but it is a return, iterable (same but different), repeated with difference. If it existed before, if it
never really “went away”—in the sense that there was no fixed temporal duration or duress—what one
tries to pass off as “crisis” may indeed exceed the “threshold” of crisis.
This is all to say that calling this a “crisis” works in the service of a mass forgetting, a strategic,
political forgetfulness that obscures and obfuscates the violent origins of nations, thus of nationalisms
and exclusions: the “primitive scene” of the nation, if you will. Deconstruction pushes us to consider
the limits and limitations of something like national identity or identity altogether: if we are a nation,
what do we mean by nation? How do we become part of something like a nation? And how might
reconsidering these supposedly natural or innate processes enable some kind of movement towards the
future, towards something like justice, towards a democracy-to-come?
Deconstruction’s political power comes, first and foremost, from the imperative to expose
that which is hastily deemed political, secular or laic, for its theological roots. Recognizing this
foundational quality of nation-states is not apolitical: it is deeply motivated by justice, which is the
ultimate trajectory of the deconstruction that is already happening in the work: il y a déconstruction à
l’œuvre. It is always already happening. Deconstruction urges us to recognize the extent to which
phantasms of origin, of purity, of sovereignty, which often masquerade as a post-Enlightenment
political tradition of secularity or laïcité, are reiterations that conceal their theological origins. As such,
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the deconstruction of a concept like sovereignty, for example, performs the initial concealment of its
original violence.
The state is etched by the contours of an originary exclusion that we come to forget. The
condition of possibility for a nation (or a national identity) is to be haunted, as the heir is haunted—
actively rather than passively— shaped by and conditioned upon what it is not. There is an essential
opening towards the potential interruption of self-sameness that can essentially contaminate and cause
it to destruct. It is the inherent condition of autoimmunity, of democracy—which retains the right to
vote against itself, for its dissolution (look no further than 2016) — of in/hospitality, and sovereignty,
which undoes itself by needing to be the “One” – and the only one! But at the same time, for sovereignty
to work, it requires the legitimation of its Oneness from others, who recognize its sovereign oneness,
who must also be “Ones,” sovereign in their ability to decide the exception, the exemption, the
exclusion, as it were.
« Je n'ai qu'une langue, ce n'est pas la mienne. »
Derrida’s bloodwork can be understood as an attempt to subvert, to undermine, to expose the
phantasm of sovereignty. As a general observation, Derrida’s later works, which are not only more
explicitly political than ever before, but more personal than his earlier work, perform a kind of
denaturalization, if you will permit the play on words: a de-naturalization of concepts that masquerade
as political, philosophical, secular or laic, which are simply reiterations of an Abrahamic, theologico-
political root.
In Le Monolingualisme de l’autre, the target of theologico-political deconstruction is the notion
of la langue maternelle. Derrida revolts against the idea that language is natural, or that one language can
be more natural than another: language does not belong to the people who speak it. There is no
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propriety of language: it has no owners. Any and every language is a system that is inherited, whether
from your mother or father or not is irrelevant. Maternity or a relation to the maternal cannot be said
to be natural in the same way: the lines between surrogacy and technologies of fertilization remain
essential possibilities in the maternal and paternal universe. Thus, these are most akin to legal fictions.
The project of denaturalization of the origin may be read through an autobiographical lens—and
Derrida does evoke details of his life to make this point—particularly with regards to ses origines, via
the question of nationality and citizenship.
Jacques Derrida was born into to an assimilated Jewish family in 1930 in the El-Biar
neighborhood of Algiers. Fifty years before his birth, Algeria’s Jewish population was granted French
citizenship by the Crémieux decree of 1870. At the time of the Second World War, Vichy Algeria
adopted increasingly anti-Jewish policies, including the implementation of a numerus clausus between
1940 and 1943 that limited the work available to Jewish adults, and the subsequent revocation of the
Crémieux decree and the denaturalization of Algeria’s Jewish population. During this time, Jewish
children, like Jacques Derrida, were kicked out of school and relocated to Jewish-only schools. In Le
Monolingualisme de l’autre, ou la prosthèse d’origine, Derrida describes his freefall into the abyss of
statelessness in terms of a trouble de l’identité— a suspicion of identity and identification, but also of
communities—religious, national, and otherwise.
Out of this placeless rejection, this double revocation, in an attempt to situate himself in
relation to a Judeo-Franco-North African identity, Derrida asserts: je n’ai qu’une langue, ce n’est pas la
mienne. Braiding together the concepts of culture/cultivation, language, and citizenship, Derrida
explores the complexity of his [non-]appartenance to the designation Franco-North African, and
moreover, the nature of this trait d’union. The titular evocation of prosthesis of origin reveals itself as
multiple and layered: it is at once the artifice of citizenship and of language, for these are not natural
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givens—there is no langue maternelle as such, which is to say, a language that is natural or innate.
The denaturalization of langue maternelle does not constitute a depolitization of language itself:
the point of this deconstruction is repolitization. When we can no longer say that any language is
natural or proper, we must identify (and sometimes fight against) symbolic appropriations.
Naturalizing what is not “natural” makes us susceptible to accepting without questioning. Once
language is emptied of its presupposed naturalness, the horizon opens: there is choice, there is
possibility, there is a future. Despite how such a thing may seem, Derrida argues, that far from
neutralizing differences, the acknowledgment that language does not belong to an individual, group, or
nation permits a different kind of political action, consisting in the de-naturalization of
“appropriations” or “fetishes.”
He calls this a way to repoliticize, or re-politiser l’enjeu :
Là où la propriété naturelle n'existe pas, ni le droit de propriété en général, là où on
reconnaît cette dé-propriation, il est possible et il devient plus nécessaire que jamais
d'identifier, parfois pour les combattre, des mouvements, des phantasmes, des
«idéologies» , des « fétichisations » et des symboliques de l'appropriation.
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In Monolingualisme, Derrida outlines the structures in place that precondition our willingness or
complacency (not by any kind of natural or essential force) as the triad of mastery and masters: nation,
school, language. The stakes of such a move stir a tectonic shift: we must recognize that appropriation
is already artificial, it is making one’s own. The rub, so to speak, is that appropriation itself is not an
act (in the sense of active). Appropriation is active and activated—we can start from there. In this way
appropriation is a form of affirmation: saying yes to the inheritance.

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MLDA 121
89
As a beneficiary of a mass naturalization that took place well before his birth, Derrida was not
asked to affirm, confirm, or deny his nationality: he was French. As an heir to the Crémieux decree,
his nationality simply was. He was not asked to inherit, but nonetheless, he inherited. There was
nothing essential or necessarily natural about the historical fact of his French nationality: Jewish
Algerians were made citizens by the Crémieux Decree of 1870. By his account, his family had come
from Spain to Algeria before French colonization and had lived long and well without French
citizenship. French citizenship was a Gift—both token and poison—and under Vichy, it was taken
away swiftly and suddenly, as if it had never happened.
By means of an autonomous French Algerian decision in 1940, all Jewish Algerians lost French
citizenship—without being given another in the interim. With this singular detail, the conditionality
and artifice of citizenship reveals itself—a singular event that reveals an unsteadiness at the heart of
citizenship and belonging, unsettling any notion of the essential, the natural, and identity. Derrida, in
a number of configurations, points towards the universal condition of the “colonial” by suggesting
that « Toute culture est originairement coloniale.
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» Once the artifice of construction is overlooked or taken
for granted, a horizon closes. In a way, this is how we might read Derrida’s claim that, in essence, all
culture is “colonial”.
Following the publication of Le Monolingualisme de l’autre, Aïssa Khelladi interviewed Derrida
about his work, particularly with regards to his problematization of the term “mother tongue” or langue
maternelle. For Derrida, there is no such thing as a mother language, insofar as it presupposes a mastery
over a language in itself and naturalizes language in a way that Derrida does not consider “natural.” In
other words, we inherit a language that masters us and never the other way around. For Derrida, the

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MDLA 68
90
notion of a mother language, as a language that would somehow be natural or revelatory of a person
who possesses it is an absolute phantasm : “Une langue réellement maternelle est un fantasme, c’est-à-dire qu’il n’y
a pas de « langue naturelle »…
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”
Khelladi presses upon this idea by reminding Derrida that the term “mother tongue” does not
exist in Arabic—the idea is expressed by “language of God,” displacing the referent and point of
departure of communication from the mother to the place of God. Derrida has expressed his regret
for not speaking Arabic; it was a language that he claims was “denied” to him, or at the very least,
dissuaded from learning: « On m’a interdit d’apprendre et de parler l’arabe. Pas officiellement, mais la situation de
fait était ainsi. »
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This interdiction is discussed at length in Monolingualisme as part and parcel of a colonial
culture, characterized by the way in which it obliterates origins in the service of naturalizing a dominant
way of life, language, or culture. Derrida takes the stance that language is never natural, that it is always
already imposed. When prompted by Khelladi to approach the question of Francophonie in Algeria,
where French-speaking intellectuals, journalists, professionals have been assassinated for producing
work and thought in French, particularly in the 1990s during the la décennie noire, Derrida suggests that,
in order to begin to consider the colonial violence of language imposition, one must first concede that
one is never the master of a language:
…je suis à la fois toujours « dominé » dans la langue, qui est toujours la langue de
l’autre, même quand c’est ma langue maternelle, que, ensuite, le dominateur, le
colonisateur par exemple, peut prétendre— et c’est un fantasme—, imposer sa langue
à l’autre. Pour qu’il exerce cette violence, pour qu’il rêve de cette violence, de cette
imposition, il faut qu’il s’imagine, qu’il fasse croire que cette langue est la sienne. Le
colonisateur français a le même rapport de sujétion à la langue française que le colonisé
et c’est cela qui explique la violence…Autrement dit, je comprends très bien que des
Algériens, ou même des Provençaux, luttent contre le pouvoir colonisateur central se
référent à une langue dite maternelle, essayent de la développer, de la cultiver comme
un pouvoir d’émancipation—et je pourrais éventuellement me solidariser avec ce

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L’une des pires oppressions 2
88
L’une des pires oppressions 9
91
mouvement-là—mais on ne me fera pas dire que la langue maternelle est une langue
naturelle.
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Derrida does not concede to a politicization of the French language—or perhaps any language:
For him, the French language does not belong to the “French”.
En soi, le fait de parler une langue, quelle qu’elle soit, ne me paraît jamais condamnable.
Dire un mot dans une langue ne peut en aucun cas rendre cette langue suspecte. On
ne peut dire, même en Algérie, que parler français soit synonyme de néocolonialisme
ou d’une attitude politique reprochable. De même, je peux reprocher à Le Pen, en
France, les idées qu’il véhicule à travers la langue française mais non le fait qu’il parle
français.
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Blood writing, or How to Surprise God : Circonfession
Derrida’s Circonfession, or Circumfession, composed of « cinquante-neuf périodes et périphrases écrites
dans une sorte de marge intérieure, entre le livre de Geoff Bennington et un ouvrage en préparation (janvier 1989-avril
1990) » is a conversation with Geoffrey Bennington’s project, Derridex. As explained in Geoff
Bennington’s Forward, the pair made a bet: Bennington was to write a text that might systematize
Derrida’s thought without the use of direct citation, and in return, after having read Bennington’s text,
Derrida would write a counter-response—and that is how Circonfession was written.
In a way, this collaboration is playful, as it can be seen as a game: find a way to systematize
“Jacques Derrida” so as to replace him with a computer program—a théo-logiciel
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—that could speak
for him, do his work for him. Such would be the Derridex, which does actually exist online
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, or the
Derrida-Machine. This théo-logiciel would thus be a God project, with Geoff and his Derridex in the

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L’une des pires oppressions 5
90
L’une des pires oppressions 8
91
Circonfession 18
92
To visit the Derridex: https://www.idixa.net/Pixa/pagixa-0506091008.html

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place of God, understanding the “truth” of “Jacques Derrida” in a way that Derrida himself cannot:
to know his past, his future, and what he might say on any given subject.
The game between Bennington and Derrida, the challenge to write something that a
théologiciel—a mixture of divinity and A.I.—would not be able to predict of him constitutes a
challenge to the very idea of identity. It reveals something about the very nature of narrative and
identity, perhaps even something of narrative at the core of identity. For this reason, Derrida tells the
story of blood: what kind of story is blood capable of telling? As if each vial collected at a doctor’s
office were a sealed encapsulation of one story, one memory, that could reveal something about
oneself that one did not know, in the same way that God knows even if one does not. Machines and
God: entities that know more about yourself than you do. Gods and machines know more about you
than you can ever know.
To surprise the god-machine, the writer would have to figure out what makes him different
from divinity and from automation. As it turns out, Circonfession is a surprising text—however, part of
the surprise is that we cannot so easily distinguish the human from the machine from the divine. So,
what might possibly distinguish a human from a machine? Preliminarily: humans have mothers;
humans have language, and moreover, a mother tongue; humans secrete (blood, spit, semen,
breastmilk, sweat, breath); humans have secrets. However, they have neither secrets nor secretions
unknown to God. A computer is programmed: it follows a logic, a logiciel; thus, it has a language. And
it is not just any language—but, it is not its own. It was given to the computer— the computer is the
heir of a certain code that it did not create for itself. Which is very much the situation described in Le
Monolingualisme de l’autre, in which Derrida explodes the notion of purity, particularly with regards to
language, and especially the idea of a “mother tongue.” Our language is a kind of logiciel and there is
nothing necessarily essential about it.
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Derrida’s Circonfession would attempt to surprise G., both Geoff and God, through what he
refers to as the “improbable
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.” Derrida finds his way to short-circuit the system (a system that
essentially “kills” him) through an infelicitous autobiography, a self-proclaimed perjury—a perjury that
constitutes the act of rendering an autobiography. This text marks the fascinating and, at times,
impenetrable endeavor of coming to terms with autobiographical writing, of confronting that slippery
substance of identity, or the systematization of a life or a life’s work through blood and writing: the
inheritance of blood, of family, of religion. It asks us to consider what story blood might tell. It is the
story of Derrida’s hallucinatory memory of his circumcision, his health scare with Bell’s palsy, and the
gradual diminishment of his mother’s cognitive faculties as she succumbed to dementia in her final
months. The corporeality of the text sets it apart from much of Derrida’s other work.
Derrida’s encounter with the autobiographical genre takes place in the confessional mode, or
rather, in a style of confession he names circumfession. In this circumfessional mode, Derrida engages a
host of addressees— God, himself, “Geoff,” G. (undecidably Geoff and his mother, Georgette) and
Saint Augustine of the Confessions, the first autobiographer, Derrida’s prochain and compatriote, his
affiliate, in the sense of a shared North African filiation. Circonfession invites a reconsideration of the
confessional mode as a means of deconstructing autobiographical gestures via a citation of Saint
Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions. The text itself is peppered with countless citations (mostly of
Confessions) but also, the text itself appears in the bottom margin of Bennington’s book Jacques Derrida.
Derrida has inscribed himself onto the text of his friend, Geoff, who is the author of a book on
Derrida and of the challenge. Citations engender citations which stack upon other citations of citations
in a dizzying way. The effect of such confusion is twofold: it complicates the place origin but at the
same time, it permits a kind of hauntology, an incorporation of the other, who is able to live on through

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Circonfession 26, 27, 32
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his friend, compatriot, admirer’s inscription. That is one potential way to surprise God: to show up as
another.
The refrain, cur confitemur Deo scienti, or “Pourquoi nous nous confessons à Dieu, alors qu’il sait (tout de
nous)”
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is repeated throughout Derrida’s text. Read as a question, — why confess ourselves to the
omniscient God? Why confess to a God who already knows, not just everything about us, but who
knows everything period? For Augustine, certainly. Though Augustine’s God knows everything in
advance, it does not deter him from confessing, in writing nonetheless, what God already knows, à
force d’amour.
95
This act of love itself amounts to an act of devotion. However, in the case of Circonfession,
this is an act of survival. The Derridex, if it succeeds, would essentially deprive Derrida of a future, that
is, unless he can surprise or outsmart the system by writing “unpredictable things
96
” (in English in the
original) to survive the symbolic death that such a théologiciel would enact. Both the Derridex and the
vial of blood he describes in périphrase 2 (as well as his mother’s medical condition that impedes her
from remembering her life, perhaps due to Alzheimer’s) are pre-figures of death—me but not me.
Derrida produces texts that stage a strategic attenuation of approaching Algeria. In Derrida’s
Circumfession, attempts to render an account of his childhood are circular and evasive—he approaches
by encircling, by circumscribing. Derrida engages with the difficulties, the impossibilities even, of
autobiographical writing. He struggles with a phantasmatic exteriorization that ultimately turns round
upon itself, engaging the complexity of his relationship to a judeo-arabo-franco “identity” in a way that
bleeds into Le Monolingualisme de l’autre.

94
Circonfession 11
95
Circonfession 19
96
Circonfession 32
95
The figure of blood gestures towards the impossible relationship to identity as an essential,
filial or biological category, and likewise, for the impossibility of a perfect or seamless exteriorization
through the mode of autobiographical writing. It is also conceptualized as a maternal indebtedness, a
foreign debt, as the original blood-source of the subject, or in this case, Derrida himself. Derrida’s text
performs this crisis through the mode of circumfusion, a diffusion, a contamination, and an enveloping
of this substance— the viscous, thick, permanent, penetrating and permeating substance of blood.
The relationship of writing and blood, of writing in blood, can be observed in the cryptic opening
paragraph of Derrida’s autobiographical text:
Le vocable cru, lui disputer ainsi le cru, comme si d’abord j’aimais à le relancer, et le
mot de « relance », le coup de poker n’appartient qu’à ma mère, comme si je tenais à
lui pour lui chercher querelle quant à ce que parler cru veut dire, comme si jusqu’au
sang je m’acharnais à lui rappeler, car il le sait, cur confitemur Deo scienti, ce qui nous
est par le cru demandé, le faisant ainsi dans ma langue, l’autre, celle qui depuis toujours
me court après, tournant en rond autour de moi, une circonférence qui me lèche d’une
flamme et que j’essaie à mon tour de circonvenir, n’ayant jamais aimé que l’impossible,
le cru auquel je ne crois pas, et le mot cru laisse affluer en lui par le canal de l’oreille,
une veine encore, la foi, la profession de foi ou la confession, la croyance, la crédulité,
comme si je tenais à lui pour lui chercher dispute en opposant un écrit naïf, crédule,
qui par quelque transfusion immédiate en appelle à la croyance du lecteur autant qu’à
la mienne, depuis ce rêve en moi depuis toujours d’une autre langue, d’une langue toute
crue, d’un nom à demi fluide aussi, là, comme le sang…
97

Derrida begins his text with the word, the vocable, which is to say, the word and the linguistic
term, but also the religious patronage, the saint’s name, the vocable cru. Calling upon this Augustinian
patronage, Derrida summons the past, in particular his past, via the figure of the “crude word” and in
doing so, through this magic word cru, he names several things at once. Here is named the cru of faith
(the verb croire’s past participle, cru), the crude or raw, the cruor of blood, the crucial or the crux, which
is to say also the cross (crucifix), that haunts the possibility of identification in his hesitant, if not

97
Circonfession 7-8
96
anxious, place within Catholic French culture. It is also the vintage cru of a French wine, perhaps even
to accompany the holy Eucharist and the hostie.
It is also the cru of the cruel, of cruauté, which has its roots in the crude (cru), the raw (cru), and
likewise in a terminated act of belief (il a cru). Derrida begins with the vein, cruor (the blood) and the
Confiteor (prayer, confession). Speaking many languages at once, in the shadow of a chrétien latin français
98
,
the language of confession, one language under the cross, “in my language, the other” (dans ma langue,
l’autre), Derrida converses not only with Geoff, but with Augustine, patron saint of confession, and
with God, cur confitemur Deo scienti.
[T]u sauras jamais, la surabondance d’une crue après le passage de laquelle une digue
devient belle comme la ruine qu’elle aura toujours au fond d’elle-même emmurée, la
cruauté surtout, encore le sang, cruor, confiteor, ce que le sang aura été pour moi, je
me demande si Geoff le sait, comment saurait-il que ce matin-là, un 29 novembre
1988, telle phrase est venue, de plus loin que je ne saurai jamais dire, mais une seule
phrase, à peine une phrase, le mot pluriel d’un désir vers lequel tous les autres depuis
toujours semblaient, la confluence même, se presser, un ordre suspendu à trois mots,
trouver la veine, ce qu’un infirmier pouvait murmurer, une seringue à la main, la pointe
dressée vers le haut, avant la prise de sang, lorsque par exemple dans mon enfance, et
je me rappelle ce laboratoire dans une rue d’Alger, la peur et la vague d’un glorieux
apaisement s’emparaient à la fois de moi, me prenaient aveugle dans leurs bras à l’instant
précis où par la pointe de la seringue s’assurait un passage invisible, toujours invisible,
pour l’écoulement continu de sang, absolu, absous en ce sens que rien ne semblait s’interposer
entre la source et l’embouchure, le dispositif assez compliqué de la seringue n’étant introduit
à cette place que pour laisser le passage et disparaître en tant qu’instrument, mais
continu en cet autre sens que, sans l’intervention maintenant brutale de l’autre qui,
décidant d’interrompre le flot une fois la seringue, toujours dressée, retirée du corps,
repliait vivement mon bras vers le haut et pressait le coton à l’intérieur du coude, le
sang eût pu inonder encore, non pas indéfiniment mais continûment jusqu'à m’épuiser, aspirant
ainsi vers lui, ce que j’appelai : le glorieux apaisement.
99

He begins here, with Geoff Bennington’s suggestion; find the vein, the words that came from
far away. He establishes a relation to blood, by way of transfusion and filiations, which is also to say

98
Circonfession 57
99
Circonfession 8-11 [my emphasis]
97
by means of inheritance, one that runs after him, a language that he tries to get around, to circumvent.
But it is not only a linguistic relation—the relation to blood is also one of faith, to the extent that it is
seen as a kind of vein itself, un passage invisible, always invisible, and uninterrupted, absolute and
absolved at once. Nothing interrupts the source and the mouth, like a prise de sang.
The run-on form of the text mirrors a constant flow, a bloodletting, an in a way that harkens
back to teary-eyed Augustine, it is also a kind of sobbing: human secretions that reveal or conceal
secrets. This confession takes the form of an exteriorization of the interior, the fantasy of the syringe
as the vehicle of exteriorization of source material. Derrida performs the impossible search for the
source, his mission is to impossibly find the source, which he approaches sideways, or rather, by
encircling, circumscribing, circumventing. The source is doubly the source of his “origin”, himself,
which is also to say, the source of his suffering. There is an aspect of fantasy to this writing, a desire
to disappear in the flood, since blood itself eût put inonder encore, so much so that it might wear Derrida
down, to the point of glorious appeasement. Glorious because it is both finally an answer to himself and
his suffering, because it brings him closer to “his God” and thus closer to his death:
Depuis l’invisible dedans, là où je n’ai pu voir ni vouloir cela même que j’ai toujours
eu peur de laisser se révéler au scanner, à l’analyse… une veine crurale expulsait mon
sang au-dehors, et je le trouvais beau, une fois recueilli dans ce flacon sous une
étiquette dont je doutais qu’elle pût prévenir la confusion ou le détournement de
propriété quant au cru, sans me laisser plus rien à faire, le dedans de ma vie s’exhibant tout
seul au-dehors, s’exprimant sous mes yeux, absous sans un geste, oserai-je dire d’écriture si je
compare la plume à une seringue, et toujours je rêve d’une plume qui soit une seringue, une pointe
aspirante plutôt que cette arme très dure avec laquelle il faut inscrire, inciser, choisir,
calculer, prendre l’encre avant de filtrer l’inscriptible, jouer du clavier sur l’écran, tandis
qu’ici, une fois trouvée la juste veine, plus aucun labeur, aucune responsabilité, aucun
risque de mauvais goût ni de violence, le sang se livre seul, le dedans se rend et tu peux
en disposer, c’est moi mais je n’y suis plus…
100

100
Circonfession 12-13 [my emphasis]
98
Derrida writes of his desire to exteriorize the interior, painlessly and without force. It is a
fantasy of an auto-exteriorization, blood that expulses itself, collected in another, an “other” vessel,
distant and outside of the body: it’s me, but I’m no longer there. The blood that is collected in another
vessel outside is the inside that exposes itself to the outside without retaining the claim of permanence
that presence bestows. This blood is a kind of writing, if it is not writing itself: an exteriorization of
an interior that lacks metaphysical presence because this mark marks absence: it is me, but not me
because I’m not there, thus this mark becomes the mark of my very absence. Additionally, the
“confusion” that could potentially ensue, once the flask of blood is collected and labeled, recalls the
dérive essentielle outlined in SEC, where the structural possibility of any mark or écriture is the possibility
of failure or mis-delivery.
The question of delivery is indeed an important one for this imagined blood collection: It is
the dream of the syringe-pen, the syringe that would be a pen, the syringue-stylo that would substitute or
would take the place of a pen. The syringe is the dream of exteriorization without labor, sans aucune
responsabilité, of a relation to language that would be without translation, without transition, a one-to-
one calculation from conceptual thought to language that could never exist. Blood, however, is
imagined as the substance that floods without labor and gives itself, heterogeneous to language, with
one major difference: le sang se livre seul. And this dreamy delivery is inextricably and nonnegotiably
literary, as blood would deliver itself (se livre) in the form of the book (le livre).
ce que c’est le sang pour moi depuis toujours, depuis que cherchant une phrase, je me
cherche dans une phrase, oui, je, et depuis une période circonrévolue au bout de
laquelle je dise je et qui ait la forme enfin, ma langue, une autre, de ce autour de quoi j’ai
tourné, d’une périphrase l’autre, dont je sais que cela eut lieu mais jamais, selon l’étrange
tournure de l’événement de rien, le contournable ou non qui se rappelle à moi sans
avoir eu lieu, je l’appelle circoncision, voyez le sang mais aussi ce qui vient,
cautérisation, coagulation ou pas, strictement contenir l’épanchement de la
circoncision, l’une, la mienne, la seule, plutôt que circumnavigation ou circonférence,
bien que l’inoubliable circoncision m’ait porté là où j’ai dû me rendre, et circonfession
99
si je veux dire et faire quelque chose d’un aveu sans vérité qui tourne autour de lui-
même, d’un aveu sans « hymne » (hymnologie) et sans « vertu » (arétalogie), sans
arriver à se fermer sur sa possibilité, descellant délaissant le cercle ouvert, errant à la
périphérie, prenant le pouls d’une phrase contournante, la pulsion du paragraphe qui
ne se circompète jamais, aussi longtemps que le sang, ce que j’appelle ainsi et qu’ainsi
j’appelle, continue de venir en sa veine.
101

Here, Derrida identifies a major problem of autobiography, which is to say the desire to
exteriorize the interior, a form of expulsion, an impulse to expulse the self—but without pain, without
force. His fantasy is of an inside exteriorizing itself, of a blood that expulses itself, insofar as the blood
is collected in another vessel, outside of and detachable from the body. If only I could reveal myself as easily
and weightlessly as this blood that runs from my vein. As if a book could be so deeply personal that it would
be like an excision, perhaps even a circumcision—removing just a part without compromising or
altering the supposed whole. He imagines the weightless, effortless syringe as an instrument of suction
whereas the pen weighs, inscribes, cuts, if only it could find the right vein.
Derrida’s dream of writing is a dream of a language that would be blood, a language that would
give itself so that he may give himself, rendering the circumfession external, and in short, so that this
blood-language might bypass the impossibility of finding the source, but also in finding the je, the I,
his singular “je”, discoverable only by way of language and writing. The seemingly incompatible pair of
self/other are fated to haunt one another, uncomfortably, which is to say, inhospitably,
catastrophically. It would be impossible to separate the pair, and even more of an impossibility to
expulse, eradicate, decontaminate the self from the other—thus it is not that they are incompatible,
but rather that they are the possibility or the condition of one another. To essentialize blood in a way
that would definitely sever self from other would be to overlook the conditions in which the self can
exist—which is to say, never without the other.

101
Circonfession 14-17 [my emphasis]
100
Chapter Three

Faire de la place : The Borders of Hélène Cixous

In 1997, the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles published an article entitled “Mon Algériance” by Hélène
Cixous, accompanied by an illustration by Jochen Gerner.

Gerner’s illustrations depict two images: a building that resembles a house or a hut, with a woman’s
head for a chimney, spurting multiple clouds of smoke containing indecipherable characters, all of
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which are floating upon a flying carpet; the second is a kind of a diagram resembling a brain, separated
into sections labelled France, Allemagne, Angleterre, Espagne, which surround the center section of Algérie.
Certain city names appear, such as Strasbourg, which can be seen on the border of France and
Germany. Algiers is additionally seen on the fantastical border between Algeria and France. Mapped
out in such a way, Gerner renders an image of fragmentary identifications and disparate parts. Each
section of the brain-map merges together around the center point of Algeria, where Cixous was born.
The subsequent sections represent familial and personal biographical landmarks. The illustration
interprets Cixous’s idiosyncratic brain map—the way that Cixous constantly makes space by
reconfiguring space itself.
In the illustration, as in reality, France borders Germany along the city of Strasbourg. Cixous’s
maternal grandparents, Rosi and Michael Klein, were both from Jewish families of European descent.
Rosi (née Jonas) was born in 1882 in Hanover, Germany and Michael was born in a small town on
the border of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, not far from Trnava
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, where his parents managed an
agricultural property
103
. In order to marry Rosi in 1909, Michael was obliged to adopt German
nationality, which included a voluntarily conscription to the German army. The couple briefly lived in
Strasbourg, where Michael opened a jute factory just before World War One. He was deployed to the
Russian front, where he was killed in 1916. After Michael died, Rosi and their two daughters, Eva
(known as Ève) and Erika, moved to Osnabrück in North-Western Germany, the town in which Rosi
was raised. Following the armistice in 1918, the historically disputed Alsace-Lorraine region and thus,

102
Modern-day Slovakia. Michael Klein thus had Hungarian citizenship and spoke Hungarian and German.
103
Cixous specifies how Michael’s parents practiced certain aspects of Judaism: his mother wore the traditional
wig of Orthodox women (even while riding their horses), and his father spent his evenings studying the Torah.
(Photos de racines 186)
102
the formerly German town of Strasbourg, became French once again after nearly fifty years of German
rule. Thus, Alsace became French, and consequently, so did the Klein family.
This is but one of the many histories of shifting borders, territorial acquisitions, de-
naturalizations, and re-naturalizations in the history of nation-states. Wars, exiles, famines,
persecutions, conquests are historical chances that bring peoples from place to place. In this chapter, I
turn to Hélène Cixous to continue the discussion of hospitality and its opposite: a counterpart or soil
mate to her dear friend Jacques Derrida, in a chapter devoted to her work and the exploration of jus
soli— the chance, the Gift of French nationality, which her work so subtly plays with. I will begin with
the story of how and why Cixous was born, not just in Algeria, but to reflect on the circumstances of
her birth.
Because the Klein family maintained an address in Strasbourg, Rosi and her daughters were
granted double nationality. It was this French passport that allowed Rosi and her daughters to leave
Germany in the 1930s. Ève moved to Oran, Algeria
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in the mid 1930s, where she met Georges
Cixous and had two children: Hélène in 1937 and Pierre in 1938. Rosi’s youngest daughter, Erika, or
Eri, moved to Manchester, England where she was also married and raised two children.
It was only after the night of November 9
th
, 1938 that Rosi finally agreed to leave Osnabrück in
order to join Ève in Oran following two simultaneous events: Ève’s son, Pierre was born on the night
of the infamous anti-Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht. Such a turning point signaled new life in
Algeria, for Pierre as for Rosi, as well as the death of her Osnabrück, and the possibility of remaining
in Germany. Rosi, or Omi (Grandma in German), as Hélène Cixous often refers to her, arrived in Oran

104
Or French Algeria: Algeria was a French settler colony (rather than a protectorate like Morocco or Tunisia)
from 1830-1962, and Jewish Algerians were granted citizenship by the Crémieux Decree (1870-1940, 1943-
1962), meaning that Hélène Cixous’s maternal family (via the transfer of Alsace after World War One) was able
to freely relocate to the colony as Frenchwomen.
103
in late November 1938. Omi brought with her the German language and folklore that colored the
landscape of an imaginary Europe for Cixous as a girl
105
. She writes:
Mon enfance s’est beaucoup passé dans le paysage d’une Europe racontée
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.
Hélène Cixous was born in Oran, Algeria in 1937 to a Sephardic Jewish father who was born in
Algeria, whose family emigrated from Spain to North Africa, and an immigrant German Ashkenazi
Jewish mother. The Cixous family lived in a multigenerational polyglot home, immersed in French,
German, English, and sometimes Spanish, Arabic, and Hebrew, which were languages spoken by
Hélène’s father, Georges. At the time of her birth, Algeria remained a French settler colony, and thus
under the Crémieux decree of 1870, her father’s family had French nationality in Algeria. Her mother’s
family, Klein, as mentioned previously, were naturalized thanks to the Treaty of Versailles, which made
Alsace part of France again. The Klein family, who did not live in Alsace at the time, was given double
citizenship due to a property deed, which was held by Michael, who had recently died during the war:
it came down to this one crucial piece of paper. For this reason alone, Michael’s daughter, Ève, and
her immediate family were able to escape Germany, unlike the majority of the family, who died in
Nazi concentration camps.
However, World War Two irrevocably changed the trajectory of Jewish Algerians. Under the
Crémieux Decree, Algeria’s Jewish population in the northern territories was granted French
citizenship up until the Vichy government revoked it between 1940 and 1943. During this time, Jewish
adults were stripped of their trades and their children were kicked out of school and relocated to
Jewish-only schools. Not quite on the inside of Frenchness, not quite as Arab as the Arabs among

105
Cixous details the history of the Klein family in Gare d’Osnabrück à Jérusalem (2016) and in the section
“Albums et Légendes” in Photos de Racines with Mireille Calle-Gruber (1994).
106
Mireille Calle-Gruber, with Hélène Cixous, Photos de racines, Paris, Des femmes, 1994. Referred to henceforth
as “PR”, p. 186
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whom she and her family lived in the Clos Salembier of Algiers, Cixous lived the precarious situation
of exclusion as a Jewish woman.
This exclusion is everywhere present in her writing, in the passage between within and without,
in the in-between of dedans and dehors. She refers to this time in her life as,
Une expérience thématisée du dedans de dehors…on peut être dedans sans être dedans,
il y a un dedans dans le dedans, un dehors dans le dedans et ceci à l’infini.
107

She lived exclusion on national, religious, linguistic, and gendered terms. From these exclusions
followed a celebration and affirmation of life, a gesture towards life through the vehicle of writing and
her theorization of her own, albeit imaginary, “literary nationality.” Text is her country and through
creating them, Cixous makes space.
Throughout her prolific writing career, Cixous has struggled to arrive at Algeria, or at least, so
close, in a number of texts. Her work, Si près recounts her physical return to the country of her
childhood, where she lost her father, the country of the cypress
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trees that line the cemetery where
his body remains, the country where she lived the negation of her belonging during the Vichy years
of World War Two. Out of this impossible belonging, Cixous’s work explores the possibility of a kind
of “literary nationality” :
En France, ce qui est tombé de moi d’abord, c’est l’obligation de l’identité juive. D’une
part, l’antisémitisme était incomparablement plus faible à Paris qu’à Alger. D’autre part,
j’ai brusquement appris que ma vérité inacceptable dans ce monde était mon être femme.
Tout de suite, ce fut la guerre. J’ai senti l’explosion, l’odeur, de la misogynie. Jusqu’ici,
vivant dans un monde de femmes, je ne l’avais pas sentie, j’étais juive, j’étais juif…A partir
de 1955, j’ai adopté une nationalité imaginaire qui est la nationalité littéraire.
109

107
« Du mot à la vie : un dialogue entre Jacques Derrida et Hélène Cixous », propos recueillis par Aliette Armel,
n° 430, avril 2004, p. 25.
108
Cyprès, the cypris tree, common to coastal Algeria, in French, is a homonym of the title Si près.
109
PR 207
105
Cixous advocates the idea of a “passeporosité”: a fluid conception of identity and identification,
which like nationalité littéraire, plays on and with the legal fiction of nationality and citizenship. What I
understand by “literary nationality” or nationalité littéraire, is that Cixous is saying that, in a certain way,
she comes from literature and lives inside of literature. One who holds a literary nationality is one who
lives in the country of literature—within the imagined space of literature, of fiction, where one is
permitted to say or not say, to do or not to do, to be or not be, anything or everything. Nationalité
littéraire holds nationality as a form of literature. In this way, as literature, nationality is infinitely
deconstructable: nationality deconstructs itself, always already. As the space of deconstruction,
literature is able to imagine something like nationality and renegotiate it. Like the law, which is also
literary because it is written (by lawmakers) and subject to endless revisions and reinterpretations,
people can “make their case” for literature in the same way that they can for law. Essentially, literary
nationality holds that nationality is a fiction that is always already self-deconstructing and is necessarily
subject to the flux and renegotiation or reinterpretation of history or world events. I believe that this
notion of literary nationality, though it seems to be mentioned only once in her oeuvre, is central to
Cixous’s deconstruction of identity.
Her engagement actively conjures and affirms the past, with stories that one cannot but must
absolutely tell, as if it were a duty. Hers are the recollections of a reflective nostalgic—the lingering on
suffering, pain, and the subsequent realization that there is no return. Yet it is also the celebration of
the nobility and dignity of suffering, which she calls nosblessures: “des blessures, mais nôtres et elles deviennent
nos titres de noblesse…
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”.

110
« Du mot à la vie : un dialogue entre Jacques Derrida et Hélène Cixous », propos recueillis par Aliette Armel,
n° 430, avril 2004, p. 22-29. Referred to henceforth as « MV »
« Nous avons en commun, ce que j’ai appelé « nosblessures » : des blessures, mais nôtres et elles deviennent
nos titres de noblesse. Nous avons pu nous comprendre à dixième de mot, parce que le travail de la
stigmatisation, de la cicatrice, était inscrit originairement dans le livre de vie de chacun. (MV 25)
106
In “Mon Algériance”, Cixous navigates the precarity of her subjectivity in light of two historical
noblessures: World War Two and the Algerian War of Independence. The essay belongs to a
constellation of texts in which Cixous approaches her upbringing in Algeria, culminating in her
physical return to Algiers in Si près (2007). In these texts, Cixous revisits and renegotiates certain
biographical facts of her being and of her birth, son être et son naître. Nothing about the verb être [to be]
remains simple for Cixous—in fact, it is the driving force behind her writing.
What can one say about one’s being and what can one say of one’s birth, particularly when an
ear tuned in French hears the homophony: n’être and naître. What is the relationship between birth
(naître), being (être), filiation (naître de…) and the very negation or undoing of being (n’être
111
…de) ?
These are the questions that fuel Cixous’s enquiry into the past, a past which is not just her own, but
the inheritance of a past that exceeds and precedes her.
The tone of “Mon Algériance” differs from her novels in terms of candor and clarity, which, in
addition to rendering it more accessible to a lay audience, bestows the text with a distilled glimpse into
the ambiguities and contradictions that characterize her subjectivity. In this piece, Cixous oscillates
between the poles of France and Algeria, magnetically repelled and attracted at once by both. On the
one hand, Cixous considers the biographical fact of her birth in Algeria as somewhat of an accident

111
Cixous plays with language as a medium, as a material. The polyphonic and ambivalence of oral matter, in
terms of signification particularly, is seen in her love for wordplay, including naître/être, amour/mort/mord,
voix/vois/voie, écris/crie: tu n’es…, tu nais... : “Tout est là : quand la séparation ne sépare pas ; quand l’absence
est animée, reprise au silence, à l’immobilité. Dans l’assaut que donne l’amour au néant. Ma voix repousse la
mort ; ma mort ; ta mort ; ma voix est mon autre. J’écris et tu n’es pas mort. Si j’écris l’autre est sauf. (La Venue
à l’écriture, 12).” Her book, La Jeune Née, is another example of this play: née/nait/n’est, je nais, je n’ai, je ne hais,
gêné, Genêt. For more, see Mireille Calle-Gruber’s “Nêtre” from Génèses Généologies Genres: Autour de l’oeuvre
d’Hélène Cixous. Galilée, 2006, pp. 37-56; Birgit Kaiser, “So Many Tongues: Cixous and the Matter of Writing.”
Comparative Literature, vol. 70, no. 3, Duke University Press, Sept. 2018, pp. 278–94; Mairéad Hanrahan, “Long
Cuts” Parallax (Leeds, England), vol. 13, no. 3, Taylor & Francis, July 2007, pp. 37–48.
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or a coincidence, knowing from an early age the precarity of citizenship through a series of familial
displacements and historical circumstances.
Cixous opens the essay with the acknowledgement that, from the very beginning of her
consciousness, she felt that her birth was the result of random chance. However, as she reveals later
in the essay, the random chance was perhaps not as random as it was historical—which is to say,
shaped by empires, wars, and displacements. The “atoms” of her parents collided in Algeria because
of a particular set of circumstances: her maternal family, having lived in Strasbourg during the First
World War, were naturalized as French citizens in 1918, which in turn facilitated her mother and
grandmother’s migration to Algeria once the fate of Jewish families in Germany became clear in the
years leading up to World War Two.
Though her mother and grandmother were able to escape Nazi antisemitism in Germany, unlike
many other family members, colonial fascism awaited them in Algeria. Despite both sides of her family
being naturalized as French
112
, Jewish Algerians were targeted by antisemitic Vichy laws, culminating
in the loss of French citizenship in 1940 when the Crémieux decree was repealed. As Jacques Derrida
heavily accentuates in Monolingualism de l’autre: où la prosthèse de l’origine, the anti-Jewish measures put in
place during World War Two were not executed by German Nazis, but rather by the French of Algeria:
L'Algérie n'a jamais été occupée. Je veux dire que si elle a jamais été occupée, ce ne fut
certainement pas par l'Occupant allemand. Le retrait de la citoyenneté française aux
Juifs d'Algérie, avec tout ce qui s'ensuivit, ce fut le fait des seuls Français. Ils ont décidé
ça tout seuls, dans leur tête, ils devaient en rêver depuis toujours, ils l'ont mis en œuvre
tout seuls.
113
… Je viens de le souligner, l'ablation de la citoyenneté dura deux ans mais
elle n'eut pas lieu, stricto sensu, « sous l'Occupation ». Ce fut une opération franco-
française, on devrait même dire un acte de l'Algérie française en l'absence de toute
occupation allemande. On n'a jamais vu un uniforme allemand en Algérie. Aucun alibi,

112
Her father, Georges Cixous, under the Crémieux decree of 1870 and her mother’s side following World War
in 1918.
113
Le monolingualisme de l’autre, ou la prothèse d’origine p. 34 (MLDA)
108
aucune dénégation, aucune illusion possible : il était impossible de transférer sur un
occupant étranger la responsabilité de cette exclusion.
114

Derrida’s text resembles Cixous’s in that they form a preliminary response to the question of
what it means to be franco-maghrébin writers or intellectuals. Derrida first presented the work known as
Monolingualism de l’autre: où la prosthèse de l’origine at an international conference organized by Édouard
Glissant and David Wills at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge in April 1992 called “Echoes
from Elsewhere/Renvois d’ailleurs”. The conference addressed topics from linguistics to politics in
both French and English, as pertaining to “francophonie” beyond metropolitan France. Derrida’s text
focuses on what he calls monolingualism— inspired by his co-panelist at this conference, Abdelkebir
Khatibi, author of Amour bilingue. Derrida muses on the nature of this international Francophone
conference in Louisiana, in light of its own history of French colonialism, and the significance of the
“hospitality” being offered now to a variety of Francophone participants, but specifically as it is being
extended to himself and Khatibi, under the headline, or “status” (statut, a word that poignantly recalls
the colonial hierarchy of French Algeria) of “franco-maghrébin”:
Ceci - qui venait de s'ouvrir, tu t'en souviens -, ce fut donc un colloque international. En
Louisiane, ce qui n'est pas, tu le sais, n'importe où en France. Généreuse hospitalité. Les
invités ? Des francophones appartenant, comme on dit étrangement, à plusieurs nations, à
plusieurs cultures, à plusieurs États. Et tous ces problèmes d'identité, comme on dit si
bêtement aujourd'hui. Parmi tous les participants, il en fut deux, Abdelkebir Khatibi et
moi-même, qui, outre une vieille amitié, c'est-à-dire la chance de tant d'autres choses de
la mémoire et du cœur, partagent aussi un certain destin. Ils vivent, quant à la langue et à
la culture, dans un certain « état » : ils ont un certain statut.
Ce statut, dans ce qui se nomme ainsi et qui est bien « mon pays », on lui donne le titre
de « franco-maghrébin ».
Qu'est-ce que cela peut bien vouloir dire, je te le demande, à toi qui tiens au vouloir-dire
? Quelle est la nature de ce trait d'union ? Qu'est-ce qu'il veut ? Qu'est-ce qui est franco-
maghrébin ? Qui est « franco-maghrébin » ?

114
MLDA p. 36
109
Pour savoir qui est franco-maghrébin, il faut savoir ce que c'est que franco-maghrébin, ce que
veut dire « franco-maghrébin ».
115

Derrida sets out from this initial question to explore what franco-maghrébin could possibly mean
generally, and what it means specifically in the case of his own life. From his response emerges a kind
of malady, an uneasiness or illness surrounding identity—un trouble de l’identité that characterizes his
relationship to his “monolingual” specter: France:
Être franco-maghrébin, l'être « comme moi », ce n'est pas, pas surtout, surtout pas, un
surcroît ou une richesse d'identités, d'attributs ou de noms. Cela trahirait plutôt, d'abord,
un trouble de l'identité. Reconnais à cette expression, « trouble de l'identité », toute sa gravité,
sans en exclure les connotations psycho-pathologiques ou socio-pathologiques. Pour me
présenter comme franco-maghrébin, j'ai fait allusion à la citoyenneté. La citoyenneté, on le
sait, ne définit pas une participation culturelle, linguistique ou historique en général. Elle
ne recouvre pas toutes ces appartenances. Mais ce n'est pourtant pas un prédicat
superficiel ou superstructurel flottant à la surface de l'expérience.
116

Whereas Derrida opts to navigate his relation to the designation franco-maghrébin in terms of a
monolingualism and a deconstruction of the idea of maternal language and language mastery, Cixous
introduces a plurivocity that complicates the idea of being and being born tout court. Like Derrida, who
recognizes the monopolization of violence that secretly undergirds citizenship and nationality
117
,
Cixous undergoes her own trouble d’identité that engenders feelings of anxiety and betrayal about having
or being a nationality and what that actually means, particularly in a colonial space. Her solution: make
my own space through literature.
By losing her nationality before even comprehending what nationality meant, at the age of three,
between the years of 1940 and 1943, Cixous’s ability to identify as thoroughly French without

115
MLDA 25-26
116
MLDA 32-33
117
See Derrida’s deconstruction of the social contract and Walter Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” in Force
de loi: le “fondement mystique de l’autorité”. Galilée, 2005.
110
significant hesitation is thoroughly and irrecoverably altered. Cixous constantly questions what it
means to be, what it means to be born, and as her algériance demands, what it means to could-have-been-
born-elsewhere. While Cixous has been criticized for a lack of political commitment
118
, I argue that
Cixous’s reticence to claim one stable position is a political position that very much reflects the
historical conditions of her life and of French Algeria.
As “Mon Algériance” and Si près demonstrate, Cixous remains painfully aware that, in French-
ruled Algeria, the “Arabs” were unmistakably treated as the wretched of the earth. She could not
shake, even as a child, “la certitude jamais entamable que « les Arabes » étaient les vrais rejetons de ce sol poussiéreux
et parfumé.
119
” However, what further complicated matters was the infinitely troubling knowledge that,
in the eyes of “les Arabes,” she was seen as “French.” Thus, her ability to pass as “French,” as it were,
acts as a barrier to prevent connecting with “Arabs,” with whom she would have liked to stand in
solidarity in more than symbolic terms.
While the guilt-by-association of her French nationality leaves her feeling always-already-
culpable in advance, there is also within her the fear that she may be perceived as ungrateful for not
fully accepting it. She navigates her relationship to France and Frenchness with suspicion:
D’un côté affirmer ‘je suis française’ est un mensonge ou une fiction. De l’autre dire ‘je
ne suis pas française’ est un manquement à la politesse. Et à une gratitude due pour
l’hospitalité. Hospitalité houleuse, intermittente de l’État et de la Nation. Mais hospitalité
infinie de la langue
120
.

118
See Ann Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Also Anne
Norton, “The Red Shoes: Islam and the Limits of Solidarity in Cixous’s Mon Algériance.” Theory & Event, vol.
14, no. 1, 2011
119
« Mon Algériance », dans Les Inrockuptibles, n° 115, 20 août-2 septembre 1997. Referred to henceforth as
“MA”, 71
120
MA 72
111
A subtle differentiation is made between two kinds of hospitality: a stormy, intermittent
hospitality as practiced by States and Nations; and second, the infinite hospitality of language. The
irregularity of French hospitality, witnessed firsthand in the wake of Vichy with the loss of French
citizenship, remains conditional and threatened. She writes:
Être française, et pas un Français à l’arbre généalogique certes c’est le beau miracle mais
il tient à l’arbre comme une feuille menacée par le vent.
121

Certainly then, being française but not a French[wo/man] (the distinction between the adjective and
the substantive) is something miraculous (le beau miracle). For what is a miracle but an otherworldly,
extraordinary event, the transformation of nothing into something, or vice-versa? It is the miracle of
être (or perhaps in this particular case, devenir) française that allowed her grandmother to escape Nazi
Germany— the miracle of a simple address that transformed Omi Rosi from a German war widow
to a French one: the same miracle that allowed Ève to move to Algeria, so that a few years later,
Hélène may be born. The entirety of Hélène Cixous’s être/naître depends on this wonderous miracle
of être française.
However, her être française, which is both her quality of Frenchness and her French being (her
physical body-in-space), exists only insofar as “stormy” hospitality (Hospitalité houleuse) permits. Her
être française hangs on by a thread— or, in her imagery, it clings to the genealogical tree like a dead leaf
shaking in the wind, which is to say, it would the first leaf to fall, the first sacrifice. Being is not an easy
or stable subject position for Cixous:
C’est ce verbe être qui m’a toujours gênée. Qu’est-ce que vous êtes ? Êtes-vous française ?
Qui suis-je ? Et répondre par un mot ou une croix dans la case, alors qu’il m’en faut cent
ou un blanc.
122

121
MA 71
122
MA 71
112
The trouble with identification remains tied to this notion of one singular position, whereas Cixous
claims to need a hundred or none : it is a kind of all-or-nothing mentality that gives her pause.
Significantly, the word she uses to stand in for the act of definitively identifying, croix, also
suggests the Catholic cross, and the extremist nationalism of the Nazi croix gamée, and the antisemitic,
right-wing league, the Croix de Feu, who were particularly popular in Algeria in the early twentieth
century. In any case, the word and the act of responding with a cross sends her into an existential spiral:
qui suis-je ? Which is both the question, “who am I?” and “who am I following?” The question itself
inserts her into a logic of inheritance, who do I come after? It situates her temporally in a history of
heirs: who do I succeed in time and space? Thus, for Cixous, the question of being is intricately linked
to a question of inheritance necessarily traversed by nosblessures, which is intimately related to an
economy of spectral allegiances and primitive scenes.
Cixous explores her algériance through a relation to paradise. For Cixous, paradise or paradis
gestures towards Oran, the city of her birth, where her family lived until 1946 before moving to the
Clos-Salembier neighborhood of Algiers after her father’s tragic death. Always speaking more than
one language at once, when Cixous describes Oran as her paradise, the word itself carries the sound
and the memory of her father, her père, in which one might also hear, “mon père a dit.” A melancholic,
bittersweet, gut-punch of a discovery: mon paradis is what mon père a dit. Despite multiple traumatic
experiences, or scènes primitives as she calls them, including cruel acts of exclusion and antisemitism,
Oran manages to retain paradisiacal, albeit ambivalent, qualities:
À Oran, j’avais un très fort sentiment de paradis, alors même que c’était la guerre et que
ma famille était atteinte de partout : par les camps de concentration au Nord, par Vichy
en Algérie. Mon père a été interdit d’exercer la médecine, nous avons perdu la nationalité
française, je ne suis pas allée à l’école publique d’où nous étions exclus. Mais malgré les
113
difficultés de vivre, malgré les premières expériences d’antisémitisme, malgré les
bombardements et les menaces, c’était le paradis.
123

In the previous citation, Cixous refers to the period of Vichy rule in Algeria between 1940 and
1943, years prior to her father’s death, when Jewish Algerians were denaturalized as French citizens
and removed from their practiced trades and schools. Yet, Cixous indicates that her first primal scene
takes place during this period. In a decisive moment, a young blonde girl points her finger at a three-
year-old Hélène Cixous, identifying her as Jewish. For Cixous, this is the first of a series of primal
scenes punctuating her childhood:
La première chose qu’on m’a apprise quand j’avais trois ans, c’était cela, en me montrant
du doigt — et c’est une expérience traumatique qui a été décisive pour moi —, on m’a dit
que j’étais juive. À ce moment-là j’avais trois ans, c’est tout à fait daté parce que c’est le
moment de l’expulsion du paradis.
124

What stands out about this scene, and perhaps what makes it most traumatic for the child, is
that she learns who she is from someone else. This information does not come from anything essential
inside of her—she does not feel or experience her “Jewishness” until it is literally pointed out to her.
The great shock of defamiliarization from the self is what makes this moment so pivotal for young
Hélène. It is not something she discovers for herself, it is something that an other, or a disembodied
someone [on] taught to her [m’a apprise], indirectly: “on m’a dit que j’étais juive.” She inherits this
information from the other; it is passed onto her without her knowledge or consent, along with the
terrifying anxiety of a generalized non-savoir/not-knowing of who or what she is. In this primal scene,
identity becomes an accusation.

123
Mireille Calle-Gruber, avec Hélène Cixous, Photos de racines, Paris, Des femmes, 1994. Cited as PR. (PR 196)
124
Marta Segarra, Hélène Cixous, et Jacques Derrida. Lengua por venir/ Langue à venir, seminarion de Barcelona,
Barcelona, Icaria, 2004. Cited as LV. (LV 68).

114
Young Hélène may have experienced the terror and dread that someone knows something
about you that you do not know or cannot see about yourself, or perhaps even the fear that there are
things about yourself that you cannot know. At bottom, this resembles the Freudian unconscious and
the uncanny conceptually. For young Hélène, this revelation is experienced as an expulsion from
Paradise. The uncanny, or her self-defamiliarization marks her personal fall from grace. However, the
expulsion is twofold: she is not simply excluded from herself but also from her country because of
her Jewish origins. During the period of Jewish disenfranchisement in Algeria, the exclusions were
manifold. Literally banned from the garden of the Cercle Militaire amongst the desert topography of
Oran, Cixous becomes initiated into the exclusion that, by her measure, she has never stopped
inhabiting:
J’avais deux ans et demi et soudain mon père était médecin-lieutenant en 1939, j’ai le droit
d’entrer dans ce lieu d’admission et d’exclusion qu’on appelait à Oran le Cercle Militaire.
J’entre dans ce jardin : voilà que je n’étais pas dedans. Je fis l’Expérience : on peut être
dedans sans être dedans, il y a un dedans dans le dedans, un dehors dans le dedans et ceci
à l’infini. Dans ce lieu qui m’était apparu comme le paradis a béé [sic] l’enfer : je n’arrivais
pas à entrer dans ce dans quoi j’étais admise, car j’en étais exclue par mon origine juive.
Et tout est inextricable. Je ne l’ai compris que lorsque le message de rejet m’a été craché
par les autres enfants. L’exclusion, je n’ai plus cessé de la vivre, sans qu’elle me gêne ni ne
devienne un domicile.
125

Rejection is something that arrives from the mouth (or the fingers) of the other. It is something
delivered through language, through fluids (here, the spit from the mouths of children). Spit is the
fluid of speech, the substance of spoken words, rendering words tangible: it is the product of speech
that renders itself. It can be extra-sensory, in that it is able to touch or encounter the skin, while at the
same time entering through the aural cavity via sounds. The fluid of sound itself, it is able to touch

125
« Du mot à la vie : un dialogue entre Jacques Derrida et Hélène Cixous », propos recueillis par Aliette Armel,
n° 430, avril 2004, p. 22-29. Cited as MV. (MV 25)

115
the surface and penetrate, by confusing and muddling inside and outside. To paraphrase Cixous: There
is an inside of the inside, an outside of the inside, ad infinitum. Here, we find again a certain immunologic
of contagion and contamination.
Cixous experienced the exclusions of her childhood, including the revocation of her French
citizenship, paradoxically, as a form of liberation. With her relation to Frenchness negated by the
annulment of her être français/e, Cixous was able to forge a belated path as a way to explore her own
feelings of guilt, even as a small child, of being more like the “enemy” French than the Arabs among
whom she lived in the Clos Salembier. Thus, her French nationality represents a certain conditionality:
it is not a passeport but a passeporosité
126
. To Cixous, the question of citizenship is characterized by what
Derrida calls the Gift, the false friend, the poison and the offering, which he takes from the German
word Gift, meaning poison. The undecidability of the Gift reappears as in a sort of triumphant
realization to which she arrives belatedly.
In “Mon Algériance”, Cixous refers to the Crémieux decree itself as a Gift, or a gift-poison. The
ambivalence of this remark reappears as in a sort of triumphant realization that she comes to in another
work. In “Pieds Nus” Cixous describes the experience as being an exultation, a triumph:
Enfin nous étions tombés dans le juste : nous ne faisions plus partie des oppresseurs…
Je connus la paix des pauvres et l’exultation des hors-la-loi. Sans patrie, sans affreux
héritage, avec une poule sur le balcon, nous étions incroyablement heureux comme des
sauvages absous de pécher.
127

126
“J’ai joué de la passeporosité française.” dans Mon Algériance, Les Inrockuptibles p. 72.
127
Pieds-nus 60
116
For Cixous then, it seems that exclusion absolves her of her guilty suspicion that she and her
family pass for French, which is to say, a guilty suspicion of assimilation. The revocation of her family’s
French citizenship comes as a salvation, as if absolving the family of its culpability of being more
French than Arab. Thus, exclusion carries the germ of transcendence. The revocation of her family’s
French citizenship comes as a salvation. This revocation forged a path between herself and writing, in
the language of the French, a language rich and equivocal. It is from the point of exclusion, absolute
exclusion, from one’s country, one’s “true” language or languages, one’s birthright, and even one’s
birth, an exile from oneself that her relation to writing takes shape.
Likewise, this revocation created a bridge between herself and the Arabs with whom she felt a
communion in anger, but yet, it did not bring her any closer to those with whom she desired contact:
Le monde était deux. Tous les mondes étaient deux, et il y eut toujours deux pour
commencer. Il y avait tant de deux-mondes.
128

The world was still split, and thus too, her identity. Cixous’ text mirrors this double worldliness,
or Derrida’s “trouble de l’identité” by reflecting upon questions of writing and genre, particularly of
fiction and autobiography. Cixous attempts the impossible autobiography when trying to approach
Algeria. Writing about the “Algeria Thing” coincides with the realization Cixous had never believed
that she would even arrive in Algeria; to physically arrive there and also to get around to it, if only
through the vehicle of fiction:
1993, l’année où je n’ai plus réussi à faire obstacle à l’entrée de la Chose Algérie dans mes
livres. Reconnaître que je n’avais jamais cru arriver un jour en Algérie, en vérité, et tenter
d’arriver à m’approcher de la Chose par les puissants moyens de la littérature, les deux
faits se sont produits à la même époque.
129

128
Pieds-nus 58
129
SP 19
117
Her suspicion towards biographical information, such as nationality, birthplace signals a kind of
artificiality of reconstructions of the past, of autobiography as a narrative event. It calls into question
the very authenticity of the individual. And importantly, this exercise takes place within language. As
she argues in “Mon algériance”, if she is French, it is by and through language. Cixous, particularly when
addressing the question of her own nationality, subverts autobiography in the uncanny moment when
facts appear to take on the qualities of fiction. For Cixous, this potential fiction takes place around the
question of birth. In Si Près, as in her essay “Mon Algériance,” Cixous’ birth itself appears as a kind of
legal fiction. In Si Près, this question destabilizes the economy of identity:
Que je sois née en Algérie, c’est un fait, d’un certain point de vue, incontestable. Je ne
nierai jamais être née en Algérie. Toutefois il suffit que je dise ces mots : « Je suis née en
Algérie » pour éprouver un léger décollement de mon être, comme une sensation de
contrebande, et même un soupçon de roman, quelque chose qui tient d’un genre, comme
si cette phrase était une citation, le commencement d’une autobiographie…Entre mon
naître et moi il y a doute
130

Entre mon naître et moi is also entre mon être et moi, something that creates self-distance and self-
difference—a perfect example of how words are not always what they appear to be. It is also an
example of how words can contradict, as one could hear also mon n’être the negation of herself. This
performativity enacts the tenant of deconstruction that words (and by extension, texts) house the
possibility of their unmaking within themselves. One can also turn towards Freud’s Unheimlich to
illustrate the same point.
The self-doubt Cixous casts upon the legitimacy of her birthplace and of her birth itself, makes
an important statement on the possibility of autobiography in itself and of the autobiography of exile.
Maria Segarra examines Cixous’ questioning of her birth in the following way:

130
SP 66-7
118
This problematizing of a basic biographical fact, the birthplace of an individual, alerts us
to the artificiality of any reconstruction of the past, of any factual or true narrative, and
to the dangers of making literature out of history, both individual and collective. Thus,
giving an account of one’s identity wounds may amount to a betrayal of their
authenticity.
131

Segarra is right to say that such questioning works to decenter identity and the inauthenticity of
such efforts, but I would mention that this exercise takes place, self-consciously within language. Thus,
if Cixous self-identifies as French, it is through language. Yet Cixous is equally ambivalent of her
Algerian roots.
In a sense, Cixous has a home, or at least a shelter, within the French language. Yet she finds
herself undecidably inside and outside when it comes to identifying as Algerian:
Je ne jurerais pas de mon authenticité. Par exemple je vois toutes ces personnes qui
demeurent en France et assurent être algériennes, et je ne me vois pas dans leur nombre.
Dès que je dis « Alger » il y a un danger. Dis-je France, c’est moins trouble, je suis
dehors
132
.
What is at stake, as Segarra aptly points out, is a question of authenticity—of pure self-knowledge,
self-understanding, of being able to say without the shadow of a doubt, without a single hesitation: I
am, Ich bin, je suis…. Cixous hesitates to identify with the admittedly recent adjective turned noun
“Algérienne.” She writes in “Mon Algériance”:
Le substantif ‘Algérien’ est né tout récemment. Avant, ‘algérien’ n’était qu’un adjectif.
133

It is from this point that Cixous reflects upon the stormy hospitality of the state in terms of the
revocation of her citizenship as a child. This exclusion is, by her measure, one that she continues to

131
Segarra, Marta. “Cixous and Derrida, ‘Subjects of French Culture.’” Contemporary French and Francophone
Studies, vol. 17, no. 1, Routledge, Jan. 2013, pp. 38–48. P. 43
132
SP 67
133
MA 72
119
live. Hers is an exclusion that lives in the space between comfort and discomfort: the uncanny space
where what is familiar is also disconcerting. She refers to it as,
L’exclusion je n’ai pas cessé de vivre, sans qu’elle me gêne ni ne devienne un domicile
134
.
It is a kind of home sans home: an exclusion is no place to stay and make yourself at home. Yet
it is something she gets used to, without becoming a bore or an inconvenience. However, this liminal
space is also the space in and from whence she writes. In this way, writing is liberation because it
resists the totalizing effects of language. Language frees itself from oppression, repression. Cixous’s
writing inhabits the pression that does not mark itself in the indeterminate space between poetry and
theory, between fiction and autobiography, between life and death, between dedans and dehors. It is
indeed always a pressing question with Cixous: how to approach the text, how to navigate the insides
and outsides, and to which extent we are both dedans and dehors.
Cixous’s autobiographical gesture is a resistance that takes place in language against a certain
tendency of language that attempts to totalize the whole, to assimilate the other, to appropriate, to ex-
appropriate, which is to say, to empty the other of otherness. In this paradoxical way, her
autobiographical gesture is to leave the other in his or her otherness: she writes from a space where
she necessarily cannot recognize herself. She writes from the place of tension between what hides
itself and what arrives, which manifests the book itself. Writing arrives—it is stronger than the subject
who believes him or herself to be writing. In this way, writing eludes the writer. Cixous’s work is
incompatible with Lejeune’s characterization of autobiography. For how can one write one’s own life,
nothing but one’s life, when we cannot even be sure who is writing, who is speaking to or through us?

134
Dedans 20
120
Cixous would respond, as she does in the collection Photos de Racines, that “it is the other who makes
my portrait. Always.”
Her writing inhabits the realm of haunting, where one can interact with ghosts. In her article on
Cixous, Nathalie Debrawere-Miller writes of Cixous’s reticence to approach Algeria as a metonymical
coming to terms with the trauma of losing her father:
Car écrire sur l’Algérie c’est avant tout accomplir le deuil inachevé du père… le prétexte
d’un retour à la source paternelle : à la langue française de Georges Cixous
135
.
Writing truly brings Cixous into the realm of the ghost, her father, to whom she is able to speak
through the means of language and writing: mon père a dit mon paradis. Writing provides space for the
self to retreats, to change form, to metamorphose, if only for a brief moment. In short, writing is the
realm of the impossible possibility. Fiction makes the impossible possible—that is its power. This is
because it is a sheltered space. In a Western context, the genre of fiction is permitted to say and do
anything and everything, with impunity. It has a protected status as fictional writing. Unlike strict
autobiography, which falls into the realm of non-fiction, fiction is not measured by supposed truth
content or the factual.
Cixous has resisted any systematic mode of writing, which makes the task of writing about her
a very difficult one indeed. The improvisational quality of her work makes it impossible or at the very
least challenging, to categorize it into a genre, it resists genre. It exiles itself from genre as much as it
is exiled from genre, and thus it liberates itself from genre by means of an inventive language. Her
work can be seen as a constellation: it is interconnected. She writes from foreignness inside the French
language as a means of resistance. It is through writing that this strangeness comes to light. It is only

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in language that one can do such. Hers is a political statement against language in language. It is the
invention of a new language, a language of otherness in which to speak, a foreign relation to language
adopted in favor of a literary nationality. It is perhaps for this reason and from this point of departure
that Cixous claims her patrie, which is to say, a literary nationality:
En France, ce qui est tombé de moi d’abord, c’est l’obligation de l’identité juive. D’une
part, l’antisémitisme était incomparablement plus faible à Paris qu’à Alger. D’autre part,
j’ai brusquement appris que ma vérité inacceptable dans ce monde était mon être femme.
Tout de suite, ce fut la guerre. J’ai senti l’explosion, l’odeur, de la misogynie. Jusqu’ici,
vivant dans un monde de femmes, je ne l’avais pas sentie, j’étais juive, j’étais juif…A partir
de 1955, j’ai adopté une nationalité imaginaire qui est la nationalité littéraire.
136

Cixous’s writing is not something easily termed autobiography, but rather, something that
gestures towards what we call autobiography, all the while maintaining a relation to language that is
literary. A gesture is an act of communication to be seen, read, and interpreted. It is a gesture towards,
a gesture of, a gesture for the other. Gesture is both noun and verb—a signal that signals or a sign that
signs. The double valence of gesture marks its undecidability from the outset, as it remains
grammatically direct and indirect. Autobiographical gesture is something that invites as much as it
holds back, it leaves traces, which is perhaps another word for gesture in the way in which I understand
it. Gestures are traces to be picked up by the one, any one, who is addressed.
The question of autobiography is particularly pertinent because the primary “fictional” texts
discussed here could be categorized as autobiography, and have been so categorized by critics. I believe
this is an erroneous characterization, or at best, falls short of the mark. Philip Lejeune, the
autobiographical specialist par excellence, writes of an unspoken pact between author and audience,
le pacte autobiographique, in his work of the same name. He writes,

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PR 207
122
Pour qu'il y ait une autobiographie, il faut que l'auteur passe avec ses lecteurs un pacte, un
contrat, qu'il leur raconte sa vie en détail, et rien que sa vie.
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However, in Cixous’s works, the possibility of such a pact is fundamentally called into question.
Her writing embodies the merging of poetry, fiction, criticism, philosophy where the one who is
writing disappears, retreats, or is not “I,” sometimes becoming wholly other. Autobiography, if such
a thing exists, is thrown into crisis. To return to Derrida’s main problematic of Circonfession, his citation
of Augustine, why must I confess to a God who already knows everything? The relation to the self is
already a fiction conditioned by silences and edits.
In language, as in writing, one is inhabited by the other. Language is a system into which one is
born or initiated: it is necessarily appropriated by the one who communicates, as well as the one who
is addressed. It is a system that presupposes the presence of an other who will (or perhaps will not)
understand what is communicated. In other words, I cannot paint my portrait without the other: the
other must structure it. My portrait cannot exist without the other. But what could this mean? What
is the implication of otherness in my portrait, and moreover, in myself? The other is always present in
Cixous’s writing, like a chorus of voices that sing through her, that speak to her, that countersign her
writing. Language, writing, citation exist in her texts as forms of incorporation, that allows the other to
live on with her and through her.
Though not everyone remains convinced or satisfied with Cixous’s “literary nationality,”
including Ann Laura Stoler. In her fascinating analysis of colonial aphasia, Stoler takes but a moment
to address Cixous’s fictitious status. Her critique of Hélène Cixous is aimed at what Stoler perceives
as Cixous’s reticence to talk about Algeria and her algeriance. Cixous’s complex rejection of “belonging”

137
Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique. Editions du Seuil, 1975.

123
to Algeria or any nation in general remains a source of frustration for Stoler: “Then there is Derrida’s
intellectual and political comrade in arms, Hélène Cixous, French feminist writer par excellence, who
rarely mentioned that she was born in Oran, Algeria, to a Jewish family. Cixous first writes about her
impoverished, ‘clandestine’ childhood as a nomad and ‘outsider’; of her French passport as a ‘forgery’
in an autobiographical declaration of expulsion as a Jew; and of her disavowal of ‘allegiance’ to any
place and anywhere—and decidedly not to Algeria—in Mon Algériance. The book appeared some four
decades after she arrived in France and two decades after she had become the famous ‘French’ author.
It is severed ties on which she insists and depends. As Anne Norton has put it so well, ‘She remembers
that she is the child of a refugee; she forgets that she is the child of colonialism.’”
138

There may be something a bit ironic about the reading Stoler does of Cixous, and it really seems
to be operating at an unconscious level, which is to say it’s in the text, already in there: il y a la
deconstruction à l’oeuvre. It seems that Stoler might ironically find comfort if Cixous were to take a
regionalist position. Stoler’s criticism seems to target Cixous for being untethered, “her disavowal of
allegiance to any place or anywhere,” with is to say, for not being grounded at all: the intimation being that
Cixous should pledge allegiance to the soil, some soil, (any soil!). The suggestion that Cixous purposely
covers her own roots, especially when she’s written a book about roots, is simply untrue. Above all,
the thing that misses the mark, and is potentially quite harmful, is the restaging of a form of rejection
that Cixous writes about constantly: not being able to feel at home in general, but, moreover the
suggestion that Cixous is decidedly not at home, which is to say welcome, in France— which is a bit
how putting French in quotation marks reads. In any case, I will have to disagree with Norton and
Stoler that Cixous has forgotten about colonialism simply for the reason that the feeling of not being
at home anywhere seems to be a pretty good indication that she has not forgotten at all.

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Stoler 137-8
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Chapter Four

The rites of hospitality : Identitaires

In L’hospitalité française, Tahar Ben Jelloun defines hospitality in terms of a reciprocal right of safety
and shelter, addressing the question of French hospitality as it pertains to the history of immigration
and of colonization, particularly with regards to Algeria. In his estimation, French immigration policy,
as a manifestation of the hospitality of the state, lacks a philosophical engagement that might connect
it to the realm of morality and ethics. If the nation is a body, what it lacks is a face.

Emmanuel Lévinas conceptualizes the face as the vehicle of recognition and the site of the
ethical encounter. The confrontation of and with a face, as the first thing an individual receives, is equally
the site of a possible rejection as it is the possibility of a welcoming. This is the essential paradox that
Jacques Derrida formalizes in his lecture series, Hostipitalité. The double law of hospitality is that it is
so close, too close, to its opposite. The ideological couplet of proximity, or le proche, and le propre, generally
understood to indicate relations of familiarity or intimacy (mes proches), indicates a conceptual slippage
that naturalizes an artificial boundary between the self and the other, the stranger and the enemy, the
125
parasite and the guest, and ultimately the self and itself. Mes proches sont ceux qui sont proches et propres à
moi ; ils sont les miens.

Les miens are chez eux chez moi, and in this way, it makes no sense to offer them hospitality
because they are already at home. Hospitality is something offered to strangers, who are not chez eux.
Proximity does not guarantee that someone is counted among mes proches, either, for neighbors who,
if some emotional distance is maintained, can receive my hospitality chez moi. In a way that is
untranslatable, the preposition chez intimates a relationship to interiority, both of the self and of the
house: in German, for example bei or zu, the prepositions used in the idioms to indicate being at home,
must make explicit the reference to the domicile: bei mir or zu Hause. Chez initiates the realm of the
home and the domicile, as well as the internal qualities of a person: ce que j’aime chez toi, c’est… But it is
also a way to hypothesize or to make a sweeping generalization about a group in the formulation, chez
les…

There must be a space, both physical and sentimental, between the one offering and the one
receiving or it is not really hospitality. One feature that complicates this giving and receiving is that, in
French, the word for both is the same: l’hôte is both host and guest.
139
A neighbor, for example, is far
away enough: they do not share the same home, the same domicile, and by extension the same family.
Sufficient distance exists for a relation of hospitality, albeit conditional. The primary condition of
hospitality is the distance between inside/outside, family (proches)/neighbor (voisin): its very condition
of possibility is its exteriority and lack of familiarity (if by familiarity we hear “family) or

139
Albert Camus may be an interesting touchstone here, as his short story “L’hôte” and his novel L’étranger
both deal with the ambivalence of French hospitality in Algeria. Both hosting/being hosted and the condition
of being a “stranger” or a “foreigner” as the word étranger implies strangeness, foreignness, or unknownness
indicate an essential ambivalence of these conditions: who is hosting whom? Who is strange/foreign in a
colonial context?
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“strangerliness” (étrangèreté, both strange and foreign). Étrangèreté, strangerliness, signals distance in
terms of both a lack of familiarity, or a sentimental or emotional or cultural distancing, and location,
or a physical distancing. Étrange means at the same time strange, as in bizarre, and foreign, which is to
say, from elsewhere, lointain, not from here—from some distant other place.

I am in immediate contact with mes proches, who are not étrangers—they are my emergency
contacts, they are the very closest thing to me and could even be chez moi. Oftentimes I live with my
proches, as I may live with my family or with a romantic partner: they are les miens, and as such, they are
close, and moreover, they are often close enough to touch. The semantic chain of propre, propreté,
propriété and its proximity to the proche may set off alarm bells when propre is read as cleanliness, as
opposed to impropre, which is what is contaminated, adulterated, or impure, as the link is readily made
to practices of ‘ethnic cleansing’ as a form of ethnic purification
140
. At stake in hospitality, or even in
pondering such a thing as hospitality, is the deconstruction of the propre and the proximate: what is
proper [propre], what is suitable, what or who belongs [propre], cleanliness and tidiness [propreté] (or the
ability to keep “improper” elements out), what and who is close (proche), too close, which is to say,
which elements potentially pollute the propreté, which is both the cleanliness and irreproachability, of
the home chez soi.

Dirtiness and impurity are contradictory with what is propre, and as such, must be held at a
distance, must be identified as corrupt or contaminated. This voisinage of propre and sale brings us into
another kind of logic, or rather an impulse: expulsion. What is identified as contaminated must be

140
The term “ethnic purification” was reconfigured as “ethnic cleansing” during the 1980s in the Soviet context,
and later was picked up by the Western media to describe the situation of the Bosnian War of 1992-1995.
Ethnic cleansing differs from genocide in that it often concentrates on the forced migration and displacement
of ethnic groups rather than their total destruction.
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removed from immediate contact, for fear that it will contaminate me, or in other words, for fear of
exposure, of contact, the risk being that it is contagious. Throughout the sessions of Hostipitalité,
Derrida has repeatedly highlighted “une dimension immunologique” that brings together the figure of the
stranger, proximity, and intimacy under the suspicion that the stranger or a foreign presence is noxious
or will cause harm. This immuno-logique, or immuno-logic, functions in its impulse to ex-pulse, which
resembles, if not mirrors entirely, a common xenophobic reaction to what is perceived as foreign,
alien, corrupting, or impure—the fantasy being that the foreign presence is disruptive, precisely
because it is too close and risks contact. Contact itself risks contagion or other forms of parasitic
invasion, which in itself, constitutes another relation to the hôte that requires a purge.

Purification constitutes the underlying desire of the phobic impulse of xenophobia,
understood as the fear of what is not mine, what is different from myself and my community and my
proches; but it is also the fear and desire to expulse what is perceived as dirty and thus impure, improper,
contaminating, and contagious. The metaphor of the national body forgets its fictions and the
immunologic of contamination—identification, separation, discrimination, expulsion, purging
(perhaps even purgation)—aspires to the literal: the pur, in order to be pure, must first and foremost,
be purged, or the French term épuration, [German Säuberung, säuber meaning clean, and specifically in the
context of WWII, the Judenrein]. The purge is another iteration of the theologico-political: Purgation,
or purgatio, from the Latin purgare meaning to purify, signifies more than simply a cleansing or a
purification: it is the Roman Catholic ritual of spiritual cleansing in Purgatory, the liminal space
between death and heaven, where sinners must cleanse their souls before entering Paradise. The
relation of the pure/purging is intimately related to a particular form of catholic salvation, pathogenic
logic of regeneration, hygienic projects of decontamination, and depletion via parasite.

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In her book, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest Mireille Rosello explores the relation
of immigration and hospitality in France during the 1990s, citing the controversial Debré-Pasqua Laws
as “the most obvious manifestation of the French government’s anti-immigration attitude,” and a
transformation of the stranger to enemy: “They reflected an increasingly repressive and restrictive
philosophy, turning the clandestin (illegal immigrant) into an enemy of the state, the most easily
identifiable national scapegoat.”
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Evocative as it is of hospitality, Rosello finds that the relation of
nation to immigrant is not exactly transferrable onto the relation of guest to host, though it does have
staying power, which is to say, endurance: “the vision of the immigrant as guest is a metaphor that has
forgotten that it is a metaphor.
142
” The effect that naturalizing the metaphor of immigrant as guest has
is that it takes immigration out of its context: “the reason why they were “invited” had nothing to do
with hospitality.” Like Derrida, Rosello reminds us that this migration, which accelerated to fill the
deficit of labor in France and, eventually, all throughout Europe, was largely an effort of recruitment:
European enterprises sought out foreign labor, particularly after World War II, which is when a great
number of non-European labor migration occurred. In short, they were not guests–they were hired,
thus the metaphor for guests and hosts does not quite work. The only way for the metaphor to work
is if, rather than as a home, the nation is reconstrued as a factory. In the same way, the metaphor of
the body as a nation has also forgotten that it is a metaphor, and the resulting projections, fears of
adulteration and contamination have produced extreme identitarian politics that seem to be taking the
metaphor a bit too on the nose.

Étienne Balibar identifies the closing of borders surrounding the “forteresse Europe” along
the lines of this double law of hospitality, calling it a form of ‘containment,’ which, like hospitality,

141
Mireille Rosello Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest. Stanford University Press, 2001. P. 1
142
Rosello 3
129
embodies a paradox: whilst remaining a project of association and cooperation, it is also a foreclosure,
“un moyen de fermer l’Europe sur elle-même.
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” Border security has been at the core of the political
preoccupation with insécurité, precisely with the intention to close the national body itself off so that
nothing more, and especially nothing dangerous can enter. The tendency to equate insecurity and its
components—crime, terrorism, communautarisme, delinquency, incivilities—leads to a worldview
which France (and Europe in general) is under attack by foreign bodies. For Balibar, this is
indissociable from a racism, both attitudinal and institutional, that can never be severed from the
question of sovereignty, and more specifically the question of state sovereignty. The state is charged
with the responsibility of distinguishing its corporeal borders—who can be accepted, tolerated, and
who must be rejected, ejected. In this way, the turn towards government to regulate and regularize a
strong and steady demarcation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and to establish an uncrossable boundary in
between. Consequently, immigration has become inextricably linked with insecurity, and particularly
within the last forty-odd years, policy has reflected a desire to expulse.

The xenophobic impulse (pulsion), as a perversion of the immunological impulse, if we suppose
the common point to be the impulse to expulse based on a supposed impurity that contaminates or is
contagious on the point of contact, suggests that the expulsed other is not just a stranger in the sense
of being lointain, but that the other is too close: “un proche, d’une certain façon un intime.
144
” The expulsed
other is cast out not because he or she is too far, but precisely because he or she is “too close for
comfort,” as the saying goes. Reconfigured as a spatial, geometric, geographical line of thinking—
hospitality in terms of the home, the chez as the implication of a proper place—approaches the question
of what is mine or my own, le propre, as that which I own, my propre and my propriété. As a function of

143
Étienne Balibar, “Les nouvelles frontières de la démocratie européenne: entretien avec Étienne Balibar”,
Critique internationale no.18, janvier 2003.
144
Jacques Derrida, séminaire “Hostipitalité,” séance du 14 février 1996, 5
130
what I own, my propre is a classification of absolute non-foreignness or non-otherness: it is le propre of
the self. If the body is a nation, the logic of the chez moi applies to the national territory by extension.
The logic of expulsion finds its unfortunate literalization in the practice and policy, but perhaps
most of all in the profound fantasy, of expulsing ‘irregular’ immigrants. The xenophobic or
alterophobic fantasy is one of ejection, of somehow ‘cleaning up’ or ‘clearing up’ the national body by
expelling elements that are foreign, alien, and thus construed as contaminating. This is often the
pathogenic vocabulary employed in Identitarian movements found across Europe, North America,
and Australasia
145
, as well as by mainstream far right political party of France, the Front National (since
2018, the Rassemblement National). The current iteration of the Front National is led by Marine Le
Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie, who rebaptized the party in 2018 as the Rassemblement National (or the
National Rally), in an effort to distance herself from her now-banished father’s antisemitism and
racism. Her strategy, which she has labeled dédiabolisation, involves an attempt at self-distancing and
rebranding: changing the tone of the rhetoric rather than the rhetoric itself. Interestingly, the expulsion
impulse has integrated itself into the party’s internal functioning. Expulsions and internecine fall outs
are commonplace in the FN, which may date back to the party’s creation as a coalition of far-right
elements in 1972.
Following WWII, extreme-right parties were associated with Vichy and Nazism, making them
generally unpopular, but not defunct. By the 1950s, there were a number of radical right-wing groups
in France, one of which was Jeune Nation, a group founded by military officers, many of whom fought
in the Indochina War (1946-1954). The group’s political platform opposed communism,
modernization, and immigration, with attitudes that were vastly xenophobic and openly imperialist.

145
Australia, New Zealand, and some surrounding islands.
131
On the question of Algerian independence, there was the Poujadist movement, which was vehemently
pro-Algérie Française. The extreme-right found an entry into the political debate largely due to the
Algerian War, particularly through the actions of the paramilitary terrorist group, Organisation de l’Armée
Secrète (OAS), responsible for political assassinations and bombings in 1961 and 1962. Among the
ranks of the OAS and the Poujadistes sat Jean-Marie Le Pen, who would go on to cofound the Front
National (FN) with other former OAS members in 1972, in a bid to unite disparate elements of far-
right groups in France so that they might form a cohesive party with real electoral potential. The FN
did not see its first electoral success until the 1980s, when Le Pen was appointed municipal councilor
of the 20
th
arrondissement of Paris in the municipal elections of 1983. Second-in-command of the
FN, Jean-Pierre Stirbois, former Union Solidariste member and activist for OAS-Metropole, was
elected to municipal council of the town of Dreux, a working-class town whose name has become
synonymous with the rise of FN. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s biggest shock was his biggest win—making it
into the second round of the presidential elections of 2002 against Jacques Chirac.
Since Marine Le Pen has taken over, the party has changed in a few strategic ways: it is no
more openly antisemitic nor does it use blunt racist rhetoric. Likewise, the party has put forth a softer,
feminine face. “Marine” (her fans call her by her first name) has fostered a certain cult of personality,
which is part of what she calls a “dédemonisation” strategy for the FN. The rebranding of the FN has
succeeded in rallying even more French people, landing Marine Le Pen in the second round of the
latest presidential elections in 2017, facing off against Emmanuel Macron, who ultimately defeated
her. Though the party rebranded as the RN, or Rassemblement National, for the sake of continuity, I
will be referring to it as the FN before 2018, and I maintain that the core tenets of the party have
remained absolutely the same, though the tone has changed. The RN’s focus on identity, held together
by the fantasy of purity and origins, is emblematic of the obsession with sovereignty, a reiteration of
132
the theological political idea of the one, promoted through the cult of the self, a radical valorization
of individualism, and the mythologization of ethnicity. Ironically, the RN of Marine Le Pen promotes
a certain kind of laïcité that puts national identity before religious belonging, so as not to undermine
the sovereignty of the nation, which is a theologico-political concept in itself.
Extreme right specialist Dimitri Almeida summarizes the RN/FN’s idiosyncratic approach to
laïcité as “the non-recognition of sub-national communities”, “further legal restrictions to the funding
of religions and ‘communitarian’ associations,” and “limitations to the freedom to express religious
beliefs in public space.
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” Laïcité fits within the scope the party’s beliefs about sub-national
communities that turn to communautarisme, which is seen as identity politics that put characteristics like
ethnicity, gender, culture, gender, sexual orientation, and non-Catholic religions before national
identity, which is intolerable for the RN’s vision of the national body—and for the Identitarians as
well.
The main force behind the French identitarian movement is Les Identitaires, formerly known
as the Bloc Identitaire (BI), which was founded in 2002, the same year that Jean-Marie Le Pen shocked
France by making it into the second round of presidential elections against Jacques Chirac. In 2012,
Génération Identitaire (GI) appeared on the scene as the BI’s youth organization, and GI later became
its own entity in 2016
147
. The GI made itself known for its controversial “Defend Europe” campaign,
in which uniformed GI militants attempted to force migrants back from crossing the border. The
group used crowdsourcing in order to fund a chartered ship, which attempted to stop migrant crossing
between Libya and Italy, and a helicopter, flown over the Alpine border between Italy and France.

146
Almeida, Dimitri. “Exclusionary Secularism: The Front National and the Reinvention of Laïcité.” Modern
& Contemporary France, vol. 25, no. 3, Routledge, July 2017, p.255
147
GI was outlawed by the French government as a hate group in March 2021.
133
For GI, the French national body is beyond capacity and can accept no more immigration: its
“threshold of tolerance” has been exceeded. However, it is not only France’s external borders that
must be protected: there must be an active policy to expel the contaminating elements, which for the
Identitarians, amounts to the non-French, by which they absolutely mean the non-white. Like other
identitarian movements, GI rallies against “cultural Marxism,” “multiculturalism,” American (or any
form of) cultural imperialism, and what they see as the Islamization and Africanization of Europe,
believed to be driven by the forces of globalization, elites, and ‘uncontrollable’ mass immigration, for
which the only solution left is “remigration”—or, sending ‘non-French’ people back to their ‘country
of origin.’
Génération Identitaire operates throughout the country, with branches in major cities where
they gather in “clubhouse” atmospheres: rather than formal offices, the group meets primarily in bars.
In Paris, the so-called “Identity House” is named “La Nef,” taking its name from a medieval type of
ship used in the eleventh- and twelfth-century Crusades. The Parisian “militants,” who differ from
“members” in that they are considered to be on “active duty” and prepared to assemble at any time,
call themselves “Apaches”—a name that harks back to both the Native American tribe and to an
extremist terror group of the same name from the era of La Belle époque. According to Marc Assin,
leader of GI Paris, the group’s identification with the Apache tribe stems from a shared feeling of
being “exterminated and replaced on [our] own land,
148
” and thus the defenders of France against this
perceived threat. Génération Identitaire habitually recruit young adults as militants in order to send
them to summer camp
149
where they train in body and mind, with boxing courses interspersed with

148
Alexander Durie, “At the heart of hate: inside France’s Identitarian movement”. Are we Europe, January 1,
2019. https://magazine.areweeurope.com/stories/uprooted/generation-identitaire
149
https://www.liberation.fr/france/2020/08/14/boxe-et-grand-remplacement-generation-identitaire-en-
colonie-de-vacances_1796866
134
history lessons, which are open to other European GI branches as well
150
. Members may cross-affiliate
with other far-right movements in France (including the Groupe Union Défense and Action Française), and
many participated in the recent Gilet Jaune demonstrations, which is viewed by the GI as a positive
form of revolt by the people of France. Officially, their participation in GI prevents them from joining
the RN—however, this does nothing to stop them from casting votes for the party, which, if they
vote at all, they more than likely do.
Les Identitaires claim to have never been involved in electoral politics and insist on the fact
that they are not a political party. Though there is a lot of ideological crossover, there is also crossover
in terms of personnel. In 2018, a reporter from Al Jazeera infiltrated the GI branch in Lille and spent
around six months observing the GI private bar, La Citadelle, used by the Flanders branch to conduct
meetings, gatherings, conferences and celebrations, both formal and informal. Generation Hate
151
is a
two-part documentary that features conversations between members and damning footage of FN
members fraternizing in the Citadelle, while boasting that remigration is a viable path for France. The
crux of Generation Hate takes place during the 2018 Congrès du Front National in Lille, where Steve
Bannon spoke to a crowd of FN members about wearing the scorn of the public as a badge. This
conference was the occasion for Marine Le Pen to officially reveal the FN’s name change as the
Rassemblement National. In the crowd as well were members of GI, members of the violent neofascist
Groupe Union Défense (GUD), rubbing elbows with FN deputies, like MEP Christelle Lechevalier,
who later showed up at the Citadelle for an afterparty. In attendance were other big names of the
party, including Nicolas Bay, the Sécretaire Générale du FN, Jean-François Pedrono, as well as former
campaign accountant, Nicolas Crochet, and ex-campaign advisor, Frédérick Chatillon—a duo charged

150
Shortly after its creation in France, GI founded branches in Italy, Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Denmark.
In 2017, Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) won 94 seats in German Parliament (Bundestag) and membership
overlaps significantly with the German chapter of GI, who have been described as hippie or hipster activists
resulting from far-right makeover.
151
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/12/generation-hate-part-1-181226094751438.html
135
with campaign fund fraud for the embezzlement of public funds. In a party that rallies against
governmental corruption, one would think that fraud and embezzlement may be cause for
banishment. In any case, Chatillon and Crochet remain in Marine Le Pen’s good graces, who defends
Chatillon publicly, despite his role as the former leader of radical, violent, and virulently anti-Semitic
GUD during the 1990s.
Though there is fraternization between the FN and the GI, the goal projected by the GI has
more to do with influence than direct democracy, which means that rather than having candidates
who would run for office, GI would instead insinuate themselves adjacently to the conversation.
Without candidates or a political party, GI sets its sight on influencing politics from without. Thus, the
GI installs itself as a kind of outside on the inside of the outside— confusing perhaps, but it is this
kind of parasitical politics, sometimes referred to as “metapolitics,” that causes mainstream political
conversations to shift further right. GI activist, Cloé Jelmony, boasts that the FN habitually takes ideas
from GI’s platform, claiming that it was GI who came up with the idea to revoke the right of dual
nationality, which was subsequently taken up by Les Républicains and incorporated into Sarkozy’s LR
official platform. The same GI member, who visited La Citadelle and is officially a part of the Paris
branch, pushes back against the idea that the FN and GI work together, but rather defines the
relationship as “complémentaire”. The official policy, per the party under Marine Le Pen, according to
her dédiabolisation strategy to rid the party of its radical elements (including her own father), is not to
“recognize” GI or its counterparts. When directly asked about GI, Marine Le Pen plays them down
and refers to identitarian parties as “groupuscules”.
Ultimately what brings the FN and the GI in line with one another is a worldview in which
France is compromised, corrupt, and invaded. The National Front, now known as the National Rally, rides
the crest of self-victimization to this day: its rhetoric reflects a Weltanschauung in which French culture
and French people are in danger. The perceived danger facing France as a nation and as a people is
136
quite literally one of becoming endangered by foreign threat, whether in the guise of immigration or
globalization. It is not an exaggeration to say that the rhetorical strategies employed by the FN present
a world in which Frenchness itself is at risk of endangerment: multiple FN officials have made allusion
to the theory of le grand remplacement and remigration. Though Marine Le Pen has claimed not to endorse
the theory on the basis of its “vision complotiste,
152
” what she actually denies it is that it is an orchestrated
plan— not that such a replacement is happening, and prefers the term migratory submersion. In 2018,
she states, “La submersion que nous vivons n’est pas un phantasme, c’est le secret peut-être le mieux gardé de la
mondialisation c’est son principe c’est son moteur
153
” and more recently, in 2019, “Chaque jour qui passe voit
s'accélérer la submersion de nos rues, de nos villages, de nos villes, par une immigration aujourd'hui parfaitement
incontrôlée…
154
”
In Generation Hate, former FN accountant Nicolas Crochet claims that the FN fully intends to
instate a policy of remigration. Crochet suggests that there would be no way for Morocco and Algeria
to possibly stop it because France ‘has nuclear weapons’ and could offer their governments ‘millions’
in developmental aid based on the condition of accepting the return of ‘their’ people. At this point in
time, the FN has not yet formally espoused the ‘remigration’ platform as policy as such, however,
there is a significant tendency of FN deputies and officials to use rhetoric that is more than suggestive
of conspiratorial immigration plots.
The term, grand remplacement, was first popularized in the book L’abecédaire de l’in-nocence by
French ideologue Renaud Camus in 2010, who was convicted of inciting racial hatred and violence in

152
https://www.lejdd.fr/Politique/Marine-Le-Pen-Il-n-y-a-plus-de-President-de-la-Republique-698226
« Q: Approuvez-vous l'expression "grand remplacement", souvent employée par des gens qui se revendiquent
du FN? R : Le concept de grand remplacement suppose un plan établi. Je ne participe pas de cette vision
complotiste… »
153
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpzQXtia-PM
154
Discours de rentrée, Hénin-Beaumont (Pas-de-Calais) 8 septembre 2019.
https://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/politique/entre-insecurite-et-submersion-migratoire-marine-le-pen-campe-
sur-ses-fondamentaux_2096571.html
137
2014. Though the idea of grand remplacement is anything but new for the extreme-right, the term has
furnished an international wave of nationalists with a common vocabulary. Borrowing heavily from
early French nationalists such as Charles Maurras, Maurice Barrès, and Édouard Drumont, as well as
the infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech by British MP Enoch Powell in 1968
155
, the theory prophesizes
that unseen “forces remplacistes” are actively orchestrating a demographic substitution via African and
Middle Eastern immigration in order to make French, and by extension, white culture extinct in the
service of a global capitalism that seeks to make human beings identity-less and thus endlessly
replaceable or substitutable. While the conspiracy is contradicted by demographics and statistics, it has
rooted itself irrevocably in the ideology of the far-right, both in France and abroad, though Renaud
Camus does not claim membership to either GI or the RN.
The conspiracy of the grand remplacement follows a familiar trajectory: first, a declining birthrate,
then mass immigration. It follows in the footpath of arguments made following the Franco-Prussian
War and speaks to the anxiety of depopulation and the resulting national “weakening”. Like their
contemporaries, Maurras and Barrès identified a degenerating French population as the cause for the
defeat of the Franco-Prussian War, as did Maréchal Pétain following the Great War.
The theory purports that there are three main actors of forces remplacistes: replacers [les
remplaçants], replacists [les remplacistes], and replacees [les remplacés], or the replaced, who are divided into
two sub-categories of consenting replacees and unwilling replacees. Replacists are the main forces
remplacistes, who are behind the conspiracy, pushing a multicultural, vivre-ensemble ‘agenda’ that supports
a change of people and a change of civilization: the government, the mainstream political parties, the

155
Member of the British Conservative Party, Enoch Powell delivered his “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968,
in which he outlined an apocalyptic vision of Great Britain breaking out in civil war without severe controls on
non-white immigration, the solution to which lay in repatriation of the supposedly ethnoculturally incompatible
migrants. His strategy, similar to today’s far right, was to legitimize racist and extremist discourse by pushing
the right and center right to take a position on the theme of immigration and unemployment, in hopes of
normalizing the far right as one party amongst the rest, with the goal of ultimately succeeding electorally.
138
courts, and the media. The idea is that the replacists are using replacers (usually from Africa, generally
seen as Muslim) in order to replace the ‘indigenous’ peoples of Europe. Consenting replacees are
characterized by a denial that a replacement is happening, or alternatively, that it is a good thing, while
unwilling replacees (or anti-remplacistes) think it is a monstrosity and “the epitome of what their
ancestors had been willing to avoid for centuries, at the cost of any sacrifice.”
156

To the claims that statistics contradict his theory, Renaud Camus flatly claims that it is fake
news and uses the ban on racial and ethnic registers to suggest that there could be no proof, but, that
if there were, it would still not contradict ‘lived experience,’ comparing it to the absurdity of asking
Jeanne d’Arc or Jean Moulin to provide scientific evidence of foreign occupation. Moreover, he finds
that the “termination of the concept of race, at least in France, in the mid-seventies of the 20
th
century,
was the key moment which made what followed possible,” and is responsible for the lack of resistance
to “immigration, mass migration, invasion, colonization, ethnic substitution, in short, the Great
Replacement.
157
” Thus, the antiracist movements of the mid-seventies, in a gesture of “cruel irony,”
are targeted as the entity responsible for racism.
For Renaud Camus, mass immigration from Africa has escalated to a point to where, as he
sees it, “African colonialism in Europe falls within the category of ‘settler colonialism,’”
158
which will
be ‘irreversible’ without ‘remigration.’ Citing Franz Fanon’s categorizations of colonial culture, he
asserts that Europe has been colonized by ‘delinquent’ [voyous]
159
soldiers whose ‘incivilities’ have made
life for ‘indigenous’ people unbearable [colonisateurs cherchant à rendre la vie impossible aux indigènes]. For
those who doubt the viability of a remigration policy, he offers a precedent: the 1962 repatriation of
pieds-noirs from Algeria to France, which is posed less as an example to follow than as support for the

156
Renaud Camus, You will not replace us, 2018. P. 21
157
You will not replace us 69-70
158
You will not replace us 43
159
‘Voyou’ operates as an example of dog-whistle politics to indicate a young man of African origin.
139
incompatibility of French and Algerian cultures—characterized by “stupefying violence” towards
Europeans and the Harkis and Berber soldiers who “made the mistake of taking sides with the
French.”
160

Though they claim to be both non-violent and non-racist, GI openly supports both the theory
of the great replacement and the necessity of remigration, which are ideologically violent and
quintessentially racist. The way the group envisions itself as Crusaders and the defenders of a besieged
France manifests in the groups symbols: the official flag of GI is the yellow lambda, which refers to
the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. during the Greco-Persian Wars, and is meant to represent the
struggle of a European people to protect their native soil against Middle-Eastern invaders. The
worldview of the GI resembles more of a world of Homeric danger, which coincides with the groups
call to unite Europe under Hellenic, Ancient Greek influences, as well as with Crusaders. Their imagery
and lexicon is steeped in mythology and legends of the Middle Ages and the Christian Crusades as
well.
After the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015, GI (and Jean-Marie Le Pen) countered the
“Je suis Charlie” social media moment with “Je suis Charles Martel,” the Frankish King who fought
off Islamic forces at the Battle of Poitiers in 732, who holds a particular significance for GI. In 2012,
GI’s first public stunt was to occupy the construction site of a mosque in Poitiers in defense of the
honor of Charles Martel. Thus, GI cast themselves in light of a particular historical role: they both are
[être] and follow [suivre] Martel in his anti-Islamic defense of France.
One crucial element of GI’s aesthetic is counter-protest: most recently at the June 13
th
, 2020
Adama Traouré, anti-racist, anti-police brutality protest, GI militants unfurled a sign that read “Justice
pour les victims du racisme anti-blanc #White Lives Matter” from the rooftop of a complex

160
You will not replace us 47
140
overlooking the Place de la République in Paris. The GI denounced submissive governmental
response, calling for the Interior Minister Christophe Castaner (who left office in July 2020) to drop
cases against police and the ban on strangleholds in the name of anti-white racism and a refusal to
“get down on one knee.” Another instance of this refusal to ‘submit’ comes in the form of GI’s most
infamous “Defend Europe” campaigns. In July 2017, after a campaign to crowdfund a boat to charter
in the Mediterranean, GI took to the sea to force migrant ships originating in Libya, albeit ineffectively,
from crossing over to Italy. Then, on April 21
st
, 2018, GI militants wearing blue uniforms (which
resemble police uniforms) annexed a crossing in the alps near the French-Italian border to intercept
migrants crossing from Italy into France, using flares, a giant banner reading (in English) “Closed
Border: You will not make Europe home! NO WAY”, “Back to your homeland!”, a small chartered
plane, and a helicopter in an attempt to force migrants to turn back. For their Alps campaign, GI was
fined 75,000 Euros and its president Clement Gandelin, spokesman Romain Espino, and organizer
Damien Lefevre were punished by disallowing them to vote for five years for impersonating police.
As a whole, Identitarian Movements have one main goal which consists in purifying pretty
much every aspect of society: political corruption, the relationship to the land and environmentalism,
and most direly of all, culture and ethnicity. The ‘uncontrolled immigration can only be reined in by a
remigration that would expulse all of the foreign elements. For Identitarians, “multiculturalism” simply
does not work: it only promotes more conflict. The way forward is for each culture to keep to its own
because ‘mixing’ would only work to ‘dilute’ it, making it weaker. The formula métissage equals
decadence functions in terms of ethnicity and culture as much as it does for globalization and its
foreign influences and tastes. Thus. GI’s two focal issues are remigration (sending all non-white people
back to the country ‘of origin’) and closing France’s borders indefinitely.

141
These goals resonate profoundly with far-right ideology, but quite perfectly with the RN’s
platform of insécurité and submersion migratoire. There is significant overlap with general far-right values
of ‘law and order,’ or sécurité in the French context (where crime and border control are both
considered issues of security and policing), anti-immigration (limits on refugee/asylum, problematic
assimilation), unemployment and the strengthening of the national economy, anti-globalization, and a
national identity based on patriotism, nativism, or identitarianism.
In an interview with political scientist and far-right specialist, Jean-Yves Camus, he describes
how the Identitarians understand “le multiculturalisme comme un projet pathogène, produisant
criminalité, perte des repères et, au final, possibilité d’une ‘guerre ethnique’ sur le sol européen…”
What this pathogenic project presupposes is a relation to otherness in terms of what is not propre, and
is thus, impure, contaminated, and contaminating. The impulse is quasi neurotic: what drives it
amounts to a fantasy of purity and of the purity of origins.

As discussed in Chapter Two, this fantasy is not exactly new either. It resembles the Nazi “Blut
and Boden” (or Blubo, blood and soil), or the mystical connection of both blood and land which gave
the German people their ‘special’ Aryan powers—beings previously capable of telepathy, who bred
out their magical qualities through interbreeding, which was a large part of the inspiration for their
turn to eugenics, euthanasia, and the genocide of the ‘final solution.’ Such valorization of purity is the
quintessence of the theologico-politico—it is the quest for the Holy grail, the purity of a race. Its
ideological result: xenophobia à la RN or GI, this ultranationalist constellation of the theologico-
political, the pollution of the “race.” Even the notorious racist Ernest Renan acknowledged that purity
was a fantasy: in his1882 discourse, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?, Renan sets forth the differentiation between
a Germanic model of a nation, based on jus sanguinis (and fueled by a disillusionment with Germany
142
after the Franco-Prussian War), and the French nation, which was a great union of various kingdoms
and the result of numerous invasions.
Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of universal hospitality in his 1795 Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein
philosophischer Entwurf [Towards a Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch] can be interpreted according to
principles of pervertibility. Kant sets forth a definition of hospitality as a universal right of strangers to
hospitality, but not to be treated as a “guest”—so long as one stays in one’s place peacefully, a state
has no right to ‘send them back’:
Es ist hier, wie in denvorigen Artikeln, nicht von Philanthropie, sondern vom Recht die Rede,
und da bedeutet Hospitalität (Wirtbarkeit) das Recht eines Fremdlings, seiner Ankunft auf dem Boden
eines andern wegen, von diesem nicht feindselig behandelt zu werden. Dieser kann ihn abweisen,
wenn es ohne seinen Untergang geschehen kann; so lange er aber auf seinem Platz sich friedlich
verhält, ihm nicht feindlich begegnen… Es ist kein Gastrecht… sondern ein Besuchsrecht.
161

It is here, as in the aforementioned Articles, not a matter of philanthropy, but rather of
rights, meaning hospitality with regards to the stranger’s right to not be treated as an
enemy upon their arrival on the land (literally, soil, Boden) of another. One can refuse to
host him so long as doing so would not cause his demise (Untergang: downfall, harm,
destruction); as long as the stranger stays peacefully in his place, he must not be treated with
hostility. This does not mean he has the right to be a guest (Gastrecht) … but rather the
right to be a visitor (Besuchsrecht).
162

For Kant, the question of cosmopolitan law and the right of hospitality is not a question of
philanthropy, but of legal rights, and should be distinguished from a “Gastrecht” (literally the right of
the guest, the right to invitation to be hosted as a guest) but rather of “Besuchsrecht” (right of visit, the
right of visitation). The temporal and attitudinal factors are not the same: to be regarded as a visitor,
with a temporally limited and conditional existence, is not the same as to be hosted or invited as a
“guest.”

161
Immanuel Kant. Zum ewigen Frieden : ein philosophischer Entwurf. Germany: Strecker & Schröder, 1924.
P.44
162
My translation.
143
Yet, if a ‘stranger’ does not act accordingly, it transforms him or her into an enemy, in which
case the state can send him or her away—but only if it would not do him or her harm, cause “loss”
or death. What kind of “harm” or loss is serious enough that it prevents the state from sending the
person back? The idea is both vague and imprecise. Kant, who was not thinking about individual
morality here, but in terms of a law that would lead to “perpetual peace” between nations, sets up a
means for distinguishing between strangers and enemies: every person begins as a stranger (that is,
until we come to know them), and thus, as a stranger, has a right to hospitality, so long as he or she stays
in his or her place peacefully. Otherwise, the stranger becomes a known enemy, and is thus subject to
expulsion back to his or her home country, unless it would cause “loss” or “harm”. How to quantify
or qualify loss or harm? In the context of “Remigration,” what kind of a loss would be losing a
language, a culture, a family, perhaps even losing one’s life and freedoms? And perhaps a question for
another dissertation, how practices of incentivized returns by the government, which are still very
much in play, known as “l’aide de retour” compensate for this loss?
In their respective work on hospitality, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Jacques Derrida name the FN
explicitly as the xenophobic entity that drives the expulsive impulse and both seem to be suggesting
that rethinking hospitality is the solution. Derrida encourages us to rethink France’s “hospitality” (vis
a vis immigration and asylum) not as a result of an ethical commitment, benevolence, or generosity,
but as a result of a historical depopulation anxiety and the need for foreign labor.
163
Ben Jelloun frames
his argument similarly, stressing that it is misleading to say that France has an immigration problem—
it does not. For Ben Jelloun, what France has is a problem with coming to terms with the “invitation”
issued by colonial past, particularly regarding Algeria. France’s national policy on immigration (its
hospitality) lacks humanity and morality. Its policy towards foreigners, but most of all to Algerians,

163
Jacques Derrida, Hostipitalité, séance du 6 mars 1996
144
makes no sense because colonial usurpation, invasion, and violence issued the “invitation” by
destroying the traditional economy and way of life. The antidote to the normalization of xenophobia—
by which he means a general ambivalence to racism and xenophobia via the FN—is to rethink
hospitality.
It seems to me that the vehement response of Identitarians and the RN has to do with the
illusion of a cordon sanitaire that has somehow become breached. The clean divisions between enemies,
strangers, hosts, guests, and parasites have disappeared—the cordon sanitaire has revealed itself as
porous after all. We are indeed talking about the uncanny, the unfamiliar at the heart of the familiar,
and the abyssal vertigo induced by the possibility of the unconscious. At bottom, it is something they
are pretty upfront about— l’insécurité—which should absolutely be heard for what it is. It isn’t just law
and order— it is indicative of a loss of control, an inability to confront the alterity of the self, and the
subsequent clinging onto nostalgic ideas of ethnic belonging.
The identitarians are coming too close, feeling too close to what they reject: they are the
parasites. Their enclaves, their codes, symbols, cryptic cryptonymic encrypted in the inside of the
outside of the inside, attached to parties but not contributing (though they’d beg to differ, whence the
paradox of the hôte); they are parasitical to politics and to society. They are ghost skins
164
walking among
us, disguised as hippies and hipsters. Infiltrating via metapolitics, influencing from the outside, and
constituting the interior crypt of the RN, kept like its deepest secret— but the infiltration, the
subversion, the “entryism” (they even have a term for it!) that allows them to enter spaces where
society would not have them it is the greatest irony of all. They are so fearful of losing an identity that
they’ve created one—a heroic identité imaginaire, which may be the unavowable origin of their
namesake, identitaires—at least that is how I choose to hear it.

164
Term associated with white supremacist movements, meaning a person who has infiltrated a mainstream
entity, like the police or a major political party.
145
Conclusion :

Immunologic

Once more, we return to the crisis. Or at least, once again, the national body is diagnosed with crises.

As promised by French President Emmanuel Macron, the French government has recently
been presented with a bill, authored by the foremost politicians of La République En Marche: Prime
Minister Jean Castex, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, and Delegate Minister Marlène Schiappa.
The resulting document, entitled Projet de loi confortant le respect des principes de la République, known
colloquially as the projet de loi contre le séparatisme, was accepted by the lower house of Parliament,
l’Assemblée Nationale, after two weeks of debate and examination, on February 16
th
, 2021.
165

The exposé de motifs that introduces the bill reads:
MESDAMES, MESSIEURS,

165
With 347 “pour” and 151 “contre,” and 62 abstaining. The bill will be introduced to the Senate on March
30
th
, 2021. In terms of political support, LREM, MoDem, Agir, and UDI voted for the bill, which LR and
LFI opposed it. PS and PCF abstained. (Source : L’Assemblée Nationale) https://www2.assemblee-
nationale.fr/scrutins/detail/(legislature)/15/(num)/3421
146
Notre République est notre bien commun. Elle s’est imposée à travers les vicissitudes et les
soubresauts de l’histoire nationale parce qu’elle représente bien davantage qu’une simple
modalité d’organisation des pouvoirs : elle est un projet.
Mais ce projet est exigeant ; la République demande une adhésion de tous les citoyens qui en
composent le corps. Elle vit par l’ambition que chacun des Français désire lui donner. Et c’est
par cette ambition qu’elle se dépasse elle-même. Ainsi que le disait le Président de la République,
à l’occasion de la célébration du 150
ème
anniversaire de la proclamation de la République le 4
septembre 2020 : « la République est une volonté jamais achevée, toujours à reconquérir ».
Tout au long de son histoire, notre République a su être à la fois intransigeante sur les principes
et généreuse dans son action. Au fil des ans, patiemment, elle a rassemblé tout un peuple et,
parmi ce peuple, mêmes ceux qui au départ lui étaient hostiles.
Notre République s’est construite sur des fondations solides, des fondements intangibles pour
l’ensemble des Français : la liberté, l’égalité, la fraternité, l’éducation, la laïcité.
Un entrisme communautariste, insidieux mais puissant, gangrène lentement les fondements de
notre société dans certains territoires. Cet entrisme est pour l’essentiel d’inspiration islamiste. Il
est la manifestation d’un projet politique conscient, théorisé, politico-religieux, dont l’ambition
est de faire prévaloir des normes religieuses sur la loi commune que nous nous sommes
librement donnée. Il enclenche une dynamique séparatiste qui vise à la division.
Ce travail de sape concerne de multiples sphères : les quartiers, les services publics et
notamment l’école, le tissu associatif, les structures d’exercice du culte. Il s’invite dans le débat
public en détournant le sens des mots, des choses, des valeurs et de la mesure.
L’idéologie séparatiste a fait le terreau des principaux drames qui ont endeuillé notre
communauté nationale ces dernières années.
Face à l’islamisme radical, face à tous les séparatismes, force est de constater que notre arsenal
juridique est insuffisant. Il faut regarder les choses en face : la République n’a pas suffisamment
de moyens d’agir contre ceux qui veulent la déstabiliser.
En terminer avec l’impuissance face à ceux qui malmènent la cohésion nationale et la fraternité,
face à ce qui méconnaît la République et bafoue les exigences minimales de vie en société,
conforter les principes républicains : telle est l’ambition du projet de loi
166
.

For the authors of this bill, immediately, the urgency of crisis necessitates this reckoning: « la
République demande une adhésion de tous les citoyens qui en composent le corps. » The fundamental condition of

166
Full text of the Projet de loi confortant le respect des principes de la République, as presented to the
Assemblée Nationale in 2020-2021. https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/15/textes/l15b3649_projet-
loi.pdf. Last accessed February 23, 2021.

147
Republic demands that its citizens adhere to the national body. Adhérer can mean to adhere to, which
is to say, to stick to, but it can also mean to stay. Likewise, it can mean to join or become, as in a
member of a group or collective. But it also means to agree with, to concur, and to be in agreement.
What does it mean to conceptualize this adhesion as part of a biological system? We may ponder who
is stuck together and who is stuck apart. Yet, this is not just any old system—it is a body with a face.
Throughout the text presented above, the word face is repeated multiple times, particularly when it
comes to meeting and defeating an enemy:
Face à l’islamisme radical, face à tous les séparatismes … Il faut regarder les choses en
face … face à ceux qui malmènent la cohésion nationale et la fraternité, face à ce qui
méconnaît la République et bafoue les exigences minimales de vie en société.

Yet the Republic is not only presented as a body, but a project—not just any project either. It
is a project that must be taken care of, must be looked after:
Notre République est notre bien commun. Elle s’est imposée à travers les vicissitudes et
les soubresauts de l’histoire nationale parce qu’elle représente bien davantage qu’une
simple modalité d’organisation des pouvoirs : elle est un projet.
Mais ce projet est exigeant.

Part of taking care of this body-project is the sum of its functioning parts. As a system, the
national body depends on its components for its health, if you will. As it is presented in the
introduction to this bill, destabilizing forces of an entryist
167
and communitarian nature is slowly
“gangrening” the foundations of French society in certain areas.

167
As noted in Chapter Four, the term “entryism” is widely used today in Far-Right circles to describe a
political practice of infiltration with the goal of ideologically subverting institutions or political parties. The
term originated in Trotskyite theories. For more, see Kelly Thompson, “Slow Motion Revolution or
Assimilation? Theorizing ‘entryism’ in Destabilizing Regimes of Inequality.” Current Sociology, vol. 68, no. 4,
SAGE Publications, 2020, pp. 499–519.
148
Un entrisme communautariste, insidieux mais puissant, gangrène lentement les
fondements de notre société dans certains territoires.
Though this gangrene is presumably metaphorical, the evocation of such a process of rot, of
dying tissue, as the result of prolonged periods of inaction and disconnection (i.e. of blood supply), is
aptly employed indeed. In other words, the “gangrene” I am interested in here is more than a
corruption. The way this LREM bill presents it, what seems to be happening is an invasion, a
contamination, an “entryism” under false pretenses — where something appears as one thing but
turns out to be an existential threat. It’s a bit like an infection—insidieux mais puissant. While the bill
has passed in the lower house, the Senate must still debate it before it is to become incorporated in the
Constitution. However, the bill has failed to convince the left and the right for various reasons.

For the Far-Right party of Marine Le Pen, the bill is hypocritical and jeopardizes the freedoms
of everyone rather than those it is meant to target, which she calls l’islamisme. Philippe Bas of Les
Républicains echoes this criticism by claiming that the bill fails to name Islamism. This is both true
and not true: technically Islamism is mentioned in the introduction to the bill, however, it is true that
the word does not appear in the legal text. In a televised debate between Marine Le Pen and Interior
Minister Gérald Darmanin of LREM, Le Pen attacks the aspect “deceptif” of the bill for not “naming
things” (ne nomme pas les choses) and believes that it is hypocritical to call things by other names. Leaving
the irony of that statement aside, Darmanin makes a revealing point: it’s essentially a French tradition
to call things by other names in terms of laws. Darmanin evokes the 2004 ban of veils in schools,
which, as he reminds his audience, was not called the “veil ban” but rather a ban on ostensible
168
religious
clothing or symbols. Moreover, he notes that the 2010 law that banned the burqa was, indeed, called

168
Loi n
o
2004-228 du 15 mars 2004 encadrant, en application du principe de laïcité, le port de signes ou de
tenues manifestant une appartenance religieuse dans les écoles, collèges et lycées publics : “Dans les écoles,
les collèges et les lycées publics, le port de signes ou tenues par lesquels les élèves manifestent ostensiblement
une appartenance religieuse est interdit.”
149
something other than the burqa ban
169
. His final example, however, is the law of 1905, which is the
law guaranteeing the laïcité of the republic, which he reminds is not called the Catholic Church ban.
When you call something by another name or refuse to name it, I defer to Ann Laura Stoler’s work
on aphasia—which I believe applies here with tremendous import. It takes an immense degree of
effort and creativity to find ways to side-step, gaslight, or distract in order to remain within the
acceptable legislative bounds.

However, if I were to choose a word of the title of this bill, it wouldn’t be to concentrate on
whether or not separatism appears in the title, because it certainly appears elsewhere, and we certainly
know by now what (or who) that word implies. The word I find most revelatory in the Projet de loi
confortant le respect des principes de la République, is confortant. Of course, conforter means to reinforce, to
strengthen, to reaffirm or confirm, to validate—it’s an effort in the direction of affirmation. But it is
also to comfort, to sooth, which reveals the angst and the essential discomfort produced by the tensions
between these “principes de la République” and the reality of France’s relationship with Islam. Recently,
Darmanin reiterated this conceptualization of France as the national body in need of comfort, or
reinforcement, in his televised debate with Marine Le Pen. He proclaimed: “La France est malade de
cet Islamisme. Évidemment, elle a mal…elle a peur…”, to which Le Pen retorted, that’s exactly the
problem, the government is scared. For Le Pen, France suffers from a “crise économique,” and a
“crise sécuritaire” that has gotten out of control, citing immigration and unemployment as the root of
the problem, though “crise sanitaire” was also added to the list belatedly.

169
Loi n°2010-1192 du 11 octobre 2010 interdisant la dissimulation du visage dans l'espace public

150
At a time like the pandemic, the discourse of security and sanitation bled into one another.
International borders were closed, most notably in France, where citizens living abroad could no
longer enter their country for a period of time. Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise, who
railed against the bill for unfairly targeting Muslims and for severely limiting civil liberties, asking why
the government would feel the need to “update” laws that already exist, including the 1905 law of
laïcité. For me, I think there is something to this redundancy—it reveals a certain degree of anxiety
about republican principles. The introduction of the bill puts it quite simply: it only works if everyone
adheres. The tension between this adherence and the practice of civil liberties is where bills like this
one, or debates like the ones mentioned above become volatile. France’s borders were closed, COVID
ravaged its population, curfews were in place: it was truly a lockdown situation at the time of these
conversations. And at the same time, in Parliament, the French government is deciding the place of
Islamism—its other existential threat. I see this bill as an extension of the impulse immunologique: the
impulse to expulse, regulate, control, purify, sanitize, which is to say, to clean it up; to make it tolerable,
to make it work for the national body, to set it free from foreign influence. We are living in an
immunological time and there has been a collective reexamination of the kinds of contact/contacts
that are safe and those that are not.

Contact, in a way like we have never encountered or lived before in this century, is riskier than
before. In an interesting and unexpected way, the idea of contact in the time of pandemic has made
me understand the concept of the “revenant”, singularity, and iterability in a way that I haven’t seen
happen in real life in such a clear way. Every time we contact something or someone—a family
member, the door handle of the corner market—it is the same but other. It may be a repetition of an
event (seeing Mom or Dad, buying bread) but each time is radically other. Each event is singular,
151
unknowable, potentially dangerous because of the inherent possibility that something has changed or
some element has been “compromised”. Every singular act of contact is the same but with difference.

In our current times, we are also radically othered from ourselves. The potential that we harbor
an unknown or unfelt mutation, a viral cell, silently transmitted through the essential porosity of our
bodies. The absolute porosity of our orifices: the very thing that makes it possible for us to live—
breath—is precisely the thing that may cause our demise. We admit, in a radically different way than
ever before, that we have the potential to house things in ourselves that we cannot know, things that
are unseen or unable to know (without the logic of testing, without the logic of immunity, without the
logic of inoculation) whether we are silent carriers, as they’re called. The hidden enemy, the fantasy of
purgation, confinement and quarantine: we are living in an age of immunologic.

Immunologic is the logic of immunology: immuno-logic. Endless cycles and repetitions of
sanitation, rituals of hygiene, the smell and taste of aseptic, contamination, decontamination,
recontamination. Contact is understood as risk, each and every time: purity is a phantasm. Immunologic
unravels the yarn of safety, revealing that the things that make ‘secure’ are the same things that
endanger: breath, locks, phones, guns, police. The absolute porosity of safety and surveillance has now
seen the light of day, yet, “la bénédiction de la vue et du jour, c’est aussi ce que veulent la police et la politique.
170
”
This porosity keeps open, as a condition of its very existence, the possibility that it will become
compromised, inverted, or perverted, and must remain so, in a way that makes it utterly impossible to
draw a succinct line between public and private, inside and outside, safety and surveillance. It is a
principle, a possibility, to which Derrida gives the name la perversibilité ou pervertibilité.

170
Jacques Derrida, séminaire “Hostipitalité,” séance du 10 janvier 1996, 18.
152

The integrity of the self appears as a fantasy, for there is no self without difference. To entertain
the possibility of the unconscious, of having unknown and unknowable intentions and thoughts, the
innermost enclave of the self, unreachable, is to recognize the alterity of the self. In the discourse of
autoimmunity and hospitality, the avoidance isn’t of that which is too far, but rather, what has to be
rejected isn’t the foreign but what comes too close.

As much for the unconscious as for hospitality, something has to be able to go wrong or it cannot go
at all. It is a condition of communication in general that one may say more, less, or something other
than what one intended to say. One may unintentionally reveal a secret. The possibility of remarking
in general, the condition of iterability in any utterance or intention is also the possibility of errance
(which is also the possibility of the letter, the address that may never arrive)—it is the possibililty that
the guest will become host and vice-versa. There is no iterability, no utterance, no communication, no
hospitality, possibly no exchange, no economy as such, without this fundamental structural possibility.

There is always an outside within, inside the inside, an enclave within the enclave within the
enclave. Is this not the possibility of an unconscious at bottom? Saying without saying—the
unconscious remains always a possibility. There is no chez moi except chez l’autre and is no chez l’autre
except chez moi. The phantasm of the proper reveals the impossibility of a self without difference. This
is so core to hospitality— about the chez of the chez moi—the chez moi is always already unstable and
there are things we house inside of us that are unfamiliar, scary, threatening, auto-immunizing, strange
and strangers, chez nous, who are also same, also other : la perversion doit rester ouverte.

153
As national bodies, we have been faced with ‘crisis’—which has become the subject of a
deconstruction of its down. The medicalization of the nation as the national body, le corps national,
conceived as a body with limits, with boundaries, with borders, has produced taxonomies of tolerances
and intolerances, inclusions and exclusions and the profound unease, anxiety, despair produced by
economies of fears of disrupting the balance, the biome, the integrity of the nation. The national body
follows the immunologic of the impulse to expulse foreign agents, foreign bodies, foreign cells, terror
“cells,” that would mark the utter undoing of the national body and would spell death for identity.

In the first chapter of this dissertation, I have presented the history of nationality law in order
to show how the nation has conceived of its personal boundaries, so to speak. These laws are shaped
by the desires and fears of the national body at particular moments in its history and are revelatory of
its unavowable desires. In Chapter Two, I have deconstructed blood as filiation, as a model of
citizenship that would hope to preserve a racial or ethnic integrity. Blood has been exposed as a
theologico-political element that has passed itself off in the realms of law and of science. In Chapter
Three, I have introduced a model of citizenship known as ‘literary’ in the works of Helene Cixous,
which forces us to contemplate the artifice of citizenship, thus undermining the purity, naturalness, or
essential quality of nationality. Nationality in this way is always somewhat fictional. Lastly, I’ve traced
one of the most essential questions of hospitality and its contrary: the immunologic. How can we tell
the parasite from the guest? In doing so, I have discussed one of Europe’s major xenophobic currents,
the Identitarians, as participating in a theologico-political project by identifying the hidden
immunologic in the fear of contamination alongside the phantasm of purity.

154
As a final question, perhaps for another dissertation, I wonder how we might be able to conceive of
hospitality towards crisis, to emergency, to the thing we never saw on the horizon, in other words, of
the catastrophe itself? Perhaps it is something we are all learning to get used to... perhaps it isn’t.

155
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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator Besinque, Kristen Elizabeth (author)

Core Title Identity trouble: national bodies and French hospitality

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture (Comparative Literature)

Degree Conferral Date 2021-08

Publication Date 08/02/2021

Defense Date 06/03/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Algeria,Citizenship,france,immigration,OAI-PMH Harvest

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Norindr, Panivong (committee chair), Harrison, Olivia (committee member), Hill, Edwin (committee member)

Creator Email kbesinqu@usc.edu,theinitialskb@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC15675128

Unique identifier UC15675128

Legacy Identifier etd-BesinqueKr-9977

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Besinque, Kristen Elizabeth

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

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