Other Headings

Abstract

This essay diffracts the question of the heading of Europe that Derrida asked in 1990. We do so through the prism of harraga presented in Tahar Ben Jelloun's Leaving Tangiers and Boualem Sansal's Harraga. Although Europe as the capital has been ‘de-identified’ (Derrida 1992, 75) in the wake of decolonization and postcolonial critique, it still has to be de-identified always anew. Something has been promised in its name and is, we suggest, currently most forcefully reclaimed by people who ‘burn up the road’. Listening to these claims is vital for any future ‘Europe’ because the responses currently presented by ‘Europe’ are still either self-identification and closure or aversion from Europe altogether. With reference to Derrida, this essay insists on the necessity to take note of and affirm that Europe must ‘open itself onto the other shore of another heading’. Derrida was hopeful (‘that is already at work anyway’), underneath and alongside the closure of borders since the early 1990s and the increase in clandestine migration. Although we see mainly symptoms of radical closure, with Derrida and the harragas this essay asserts it can be otherwise – that it is Europe's brutal failure to ignore this call of the heading of the others, forestalling any chance for an ‘other of the heading’. It is thus ‘Europe's’ duty to listen to the (re)call of these others.

• Ben Jelloun, Tahar
• critique
• Derrida, Jacques
• European borders
• harraga
• Sansal, Boualem

Notes

1 All translations of Sansal are our own. An English translation is available with Bloomsbury 2015.

2 As Derrida (1992, 35) stresses, the point of Europe has much to do with how it conceives of its heading, a semantic doubling inherent in the French as le point (a place, position, mark) and la pointe (a head, end, headland).

3 We build here on Haraway's (classical physics) and especially Barad's (quantum physics) use of the term diffraction. Diffraction describes, on the one hand, the formation of patterns of difference, stressing the ‘relational nature of difference’ (Barad 2007, 72), and on the other hand, the critical reading method that juxtaposes texts in order to draw out significant patterns of meaning-mattering. For the implications of the term, see Barad (2007); for its uses in the humanities, see also Kaiser and Thiele (2014).

4 Derrida's emphasis on the ‘today’ and his striving to think of ‘other headings' – a different Europe – or even of ‘the other of the heading’ as a different logic to relate to the other, brings to mind two famous public interventions on the issues at stake, which Derrida implicitly draws on: Kant's (1784) and Foucault's (1984) responses to the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ It is this specific (European) heritage of critique as public intervention – developed by Kant, reworked by Foucault, revisited by Derrida – that we wish to continue in our engagement in this essay.

5 Speaking of a concern or care for Europe in this context makes implicit reference to the reformulations of critique suggested by Haraway (1997), Latour (2004) and Puig de la Bellacasa (2011).

6 The Other Heading engages closely with Valéry's reflections on the Mediterranean, but the Mediterranean is also integral to Derrida's own biography. Since the publication of The Other Heading, the ‘marrano’ dimensions of Derrida's thought, his reflections on his own Mediterranean heritage and Jewish–Algerian childhood have increasingly been topics in his own work (Derrida 1991, 1996, 2002; Chérif 2008b) and in scholarship alike. Perhaps one of the first to mention the relation of Derrida's philosophy to his experiences on Europe's other shores was Young (1990); see also Chérif (2008a), Ahluwalia (2010) and Hiddleston (2010).

7 Naas notes in his introduction to The Other Heading that ‘navigation could never be a mere metaphor’ (xliv). Yet a Eurocentric, (neo)colonial Europe, thinking of itself as the capital of culture, tends to present it ‘always … as a mere metaphor’ (xlv), eclipsing the literal level of ‘explorations of other lands, other peoples, and other ways of thinking’ (xlv).

8 Since the 1990s, harraga – from the Arabic root ‘ha-ra-qaf’ meaning ‘to burn’ – has become a term used especially in the French media for migrants who emigrate clandestinely to Europe across the Mediterranean. ‘To burn’ refers here both to the burning of identification papers to avoid repatriation and to ‘burn the road’ (‘brûler la route’). We use the transcription harraga (see Abderrezak 2009, 469), and according to common usage employ harraga when referring to clandestine migration, and harragas when referring to the ones migrating.

9 As Barad reminds us, every today is ‘an iterative (re)configuring of patterns of differentiating–entangling. As such, there is no moving beyond, no leaving the “old” behind. There is no absolute boundary between here–now and there–then. There is nothing that is new; there is nothing that is not new’ (2014, 168).

10 Entanglement is understood not as the interlinking of two independent entities, but as an intra-action (Barad 2007). Entities such as ‘Europe’ or ‘Africa’ emerge through intra-active relationality, which undercuts traditional ideas of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. See also Kirby (2011).

11 The numbers and dates in this paragraph relate to the moment of writing in June 2014. Since then, so much has happened and the migration - both by sea and by land - has increased immensely, both in number of people and in media and public attention. In relation to the question of migration, it seems - right at this moment - impossible to be ‘in time’.

12 A new literary genre has begun to form around harraga (see Poel 2011). From among numerous novels such as Cannibales (1999) by Mahi Binebine, Les Clandestins (2000) by Youssouf Amine Elalamy, and Harraga (2002) by Antonio Lozano (for more titles, see Redouane 2008), and films such as Harragas (2009) by Merzak Allouache and Terraferma (2011) by Emanuele Crialese, we have selected Ben Jelloun's Leaving Tangier and Sansal's Harraga because they examine in exemplary fashion the diverse reasons to leave, rather than pursue tragedies of shipwreck (as in Elalamy), existence sans papiers, or violence and desperation at sea (as in Allouache).

13 Chérifa had intended to ‘leave for Morocco, for Spain’ (Sansal 2005, 113) but crossed paths with Sofiane on his way to Morocco, who told her it was too dangerous ‘to burn up the road in my condition’ (113) and that she should rather head for Algiers to stay with Lamia for the birth. Chérifa is a breath of fresh air in Lamia's solitary and dejected life, mourning Sofiane's disappearance. Eventually, Chérifa leaves again for unspecified reasons, and Lamia only learns of her whereabouts after she has died in childbirth in a convent in Blida. Lamia adopts Chérifa's baby.

14 We have altered the translation here. For the French version, see Ben Jelloun (2006, 88).