La Face Obscène (FICTION) (French Edition)

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The back cover of this gem features an image of the button itself, which only makes you think a little harder about, you know— buttoning. On the left is one of the killed designs by Jason Ramirez art directed by Rodrigo Corral for the cover of this Tin House anthology; on the right, the final version—yet another vagina-that-is-not-a-vagina.

A faux-gina, if you will. This one actually makes me shudder. After all, the ladies of Sterling Cooper seemed to think it was pretty swell. A little less straightforward than the above, but the look of dawning realization on the faces of idle book-cover-scanning passerby is totally worth it. Dirty old man indeed! Though actually, this man looks relatively clean and young, all things considered. A racy book cover for our contemporary moment, in which, for better or for worse, everything must be documented—including our most private parts.

It is free of ulterior motives. Faced with terrorism and fanaticism, it is highly probable that a man might lose his soul, in other words that he might turn to the same weapons as his adversary. Llob has a recurring dream, in which the hero is pursued by a fundamentalist, immediately identifiable from his beard, who threatens him with an axe. This dream reveals the moral dimension of the conflict: It is a difficult question, and on a number of occasions Llob uses violence against despicable characters, a violence that allows him to vent his resentment and rancour on the spot.

This is particularly true when he is faced with the greatest of possible scandals, the massacre of the innocent. A car bomb is set off in the heart of Algiers. Over time you get used to it. We understand his detesting the rich and powerful, whom he holds responsible for the Algerian drama, we understand his urge to have nothing more to do with the uncultured, corrupt, pleasure-seeking nouveaux riches. But on each occasion, Llob soothes the resentment that floods through him at such times because the dirty war kills the body and destroys the soul: Like a refrain, this preoccupation with remaining human in the midst of dehumanisation stays with Llob throughout the four novels.

In their faces, in spite of the burdens of uncertainty and the darkness of our national drama, I noticed a kind of admirable serenity — the faith of an easy-going people, generous to the point of giving away their last shirt, so humble that they inspire contempt in those who have understood nothing of the prophecies DB , p. Fifty years later, is this not a form of homage from Khadra to a predecessor whose works merit a different label than the reductive one of populist literature?

This is why every 1 November Llob makes a point of joining the village celebration of the outbreak of the war for independence. Brahim Llob insists on following the straight path when the whole country has apparently chosen the twisted ways of denial and voluntary subservience. Llob is aware that he is a pawn that someone powerful could decide at any moment to sacrifice in the vast, deceitful game of chess being played at national level.

It is remarkable that the sites inhabited by these characters are so many havens of peace and serenity where Llob, presenting himself as a true believer unlike all the hypocrites who fill the mosques , seeks out a dimension that is both spiritual and humanist. Is that not where the innocent and the just wait for redemption? He serves as a moral compass for Llob, who often loses his sense of direction. And it is no accident that after the murderous raid on the village of Ighider carried out by the fundamentalists, one of the few survivors is old Taos.

Ighider is a place of multiple resistance to barbarity. The villagers initially arm themselves to fight Evil by means of citizen self-defence militia who patrol the region: The mayor of Ighider, justly proud of what has been accomplished, explains to an incredulous Llob that the commune is expanding the school and building a youth club and a stadium. And finally, the ultimate form of resistance to intolerance, art, in all its forms: They represent elements of stability in an unstable world, truth in a universe of lies, serenity in a tormented society.

They also set up the link with Algeria as it was before. An Algeria where everything still seemed possible, where the utopia of building a free and democratic country had not yet morphed into dystopia.

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Daily confrontation with a war that does not speak its name leads Llob to live in a constant state of nostalgia. This is also the origin of the mythical country constructed by the novels, in antithesis to the real world. A point of no return has been reached, and whatever the outcome of the drama might be, something has been permanently broken: But beyond the poetry of some of these evocations, we should note the emphasis on the double harmony between the people, themselves and their land.

The melancholy that fills Llob every time he thinks about Algeria in former times is ambivalent, marked by a deep despair in some chapters and touched with faint hope in others. In Muslim eschatology as well as in Christianity and Judaism , Gog and Magog are associated with times of great upheaval and conflict.

From a Khadrian point of view, we might see Gog and Magog as those dark forces present in us all and visibly triumphant in the Algerian tragedy. Conclusion The multiplication of detective fiction and other noir novels within the francophone world is evidence of the search not just for a tool suited to the description of the realities of each society, but also for a way to reach the widest possible audience. Something that blanc literature [24] is unable to do, for a number of reasons. Kateb Yacine , a leading figure in Algerian literature, had already understood this when he gave up writing to found an itinerant theatre group which, significantly, presented its plays not in French, nor in classical Arabic, but in Algerian dialect, the only lingua franca in the country.

This is not in response to another narrative, since the Algerian state has right up until today muffled any and all questioning of the events of Here we see finally that a class of novel long considered genre fiction, in other words without aesthetic value Angenot can, in the dialectics of the fictionalisation of reality versus the historicisation of fiction, develop into a questioning that escapes the ideological leaden blanket of dominant discourse.

Accessed 6 August Morituri , trans. Double Blank , trans. Autumn of the Phantoms , trans. Dead Man's Share , trans.

Interview with Hakim Kateb. An ego must be a structure outside consciousness, so that there can be consciousness of the ego. In the introduction, Sartre sketches his own theory of consciousness, being, and phenomena through criticism of both earlier phenomenologists most notably Husserl and Heidegger as well as idealists , rationalists , and empiricists.

Yasmina Khadra Ait-Arab

According to him, one of the major achievements of modern philosophy is phenomenology because it disproved the kinds of dualism that set the existent up as having a "hidden" nature such as Immanuel Kant 's noumenon ; Phenomenology has removed "the illusion of worlds behind the scene". Based on an examination of the nature of phenomena, he describes the nature of two types of being, being-in-itself the being of things and being-for-itself. While being-in-itself is something that can only be approximated by human being, being-for-itself is the being of consciousness.

From Sartre's phenomenological point of view, nothingness is an experienced reality and cannot be a merely subjective mistake. The absence of a friend and absence of money hint at a being of nothingness. It is part of reality. In the first chapter, Sartre develops a theory of nothingness which is central to the whole book, especially to his account for bad faith and freedom. Though "it is evident that non-being always appears within the limits of a human expectation", [6] the concrete nothingness differs from mere abstract inexistence, such as the square circle.

A concrete nothingness, e. This totality is modified by the nothingness which is part of it.

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In the totality of consciousness and phenomenon Heidegger's being-in-the-world , both can be considered separately, but exist only as a whole intentionality of consciousness. The human attitude of inquiry, of asking questions, puts consciousness at distance from the world. Every question brings up the possibility of a negative answer, of non-being, e. Non-being can neither be part of the being-in-itself nor can it be as a complement of it. Being-for-itself is the origin of negation. The relation between being-for-itself and being-in-itself is one of questioning the latter.

By bringing nothingness into the world, consciousness does not annihilate the being of things, but changes its relation to it.

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As Bad faith , Sartre describes one's self-deception about the human reality. It can take two forms, the first one is making oneself falsely believe not to be what one actually is. The second one is conceiving oneself as an object e. This essentially means that in being a waiter, grocer, etc. Living a life defined by one's occupation, social, racial, or economic class, is the very essence of "bad faith", the condition in which people cannot transcend their situations in order to realize what they must be human and what they are not waiter, grocer, etc. It is also essential for an existent to understand that negation allows the self to enter what Sartre calls the "great human stream".

The great human stream arises from a singular realization that nothingness is a state of mind in which we can become anything, in reference to our situation, that we desire. The difference between existence and identity projection remains at the heart of human subjects who are swept up by their own condition, their "bad faith". His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer.

Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to changing his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seems to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things.

He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing?

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We need not watch long before we can explain it: There is nothing there to surprise us. Sartre also gives, as an example of bad faith, the attitude of the homosexual who denies that he is a homosexual, feeling that "a homosexual is not a homosexual" in the same sense that a table is a table or a red-haired man is red-haired.

Sartre argues that such an attitude is partially correct since it is based in the "irreducible character of human reality", but that it would be fully correct only if the homosexual accepted that he is a homosexual in the sense that he has adopted a pattern of conduct defined as that of a homosexual, although not one "to the extent that human reality can not be finally defined by patterns of conduct".

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Sartre consistently mentions that in order to get out of bad faith, one must realize that one's existence and one's formal projection of a self are distinctly separate and within the means of human control. This separation is a form of nothingness. Nothingness, in terms of bad faith, is characterized by Sartre as the internal negation which separates pure existence and identity, and thus we are subject to playing our lives out in a similar manner. An example is something that is what it is existence and something that is what it is not a waiter defined by his occupation.

However, Sartre takes a stance against characterizing bad faith in terms of "mere social positions". Says Sartre, "I am never any one of my attitudes, any one of my actions. Yet, existents human beings must maintain a balance between existence, their roles, and nothingness to become authentic beings.

Additionally, an important tenet of bad faith is that we must enact a bit of "good faith" in order to take advantage of our role to reach an authentic existence. The authentic domain of bad faith is realizing that the role we are playing is the lie. To live and project into the future as a project of a self, while keeping out of bad faith and living by the will of the self is living life authentically. One of the most important implications of bad faith is the abolition of traditional ethics.


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Being a "moral person" requires one to deny authentic impulses everything that makes us human and allow the will of another person to change one's actions. Being "a moral person" is one of the most severe forms of bad faith. Sartre essentially characterizes this as "the faith of bad faith" which is and should not be, in Sartre's opinion, at the heart of one's existence. Sartre has a very low opinion of conventional ethics, condemning it as a tool of the bourgeoisie to control the masses.

Bad faith also results when individuals begin to view their life as made up of distinct past events.

Being and Nothingness - Wikipedia

By viewing one's ego as it once was rather than as it currently is, one ends up negating the current self and replacing it with a past self that no longer exists. The mere possible presence of another person causes one to look at oneself as an object and see one's world as it appears to the other. This is not done from a specific location outside oneself, but is non-positional. This is a recognition of the subjectivity in others.