Albert Memmi uses writing as tikkun, as a way of trying to change his world, even if he does not use it in a way that will provide restoration, which for him, as we shall see, is always impossible. He will not write in a Hebrew sacralized by Kabbalistic thought, but in secular, cosmopolitan French. In one of his most recent books, the retrospective, autobiographical volume, Le Nomade immobile, published in 2000, Memmi brings all the elements of his writing-based tikkun to the fore.

Memmi plays on his own singularity, as the other on whom otherness is always already visited, but, at the same time, he recognizes throughout that everyone is always experiencing another culture. Otherness for him is acutely visited, severely felt, and foundational, whereas for some, it may be conceived of in a kind of false consciousness as merely accidental, in the philosophical sense of the word. If there is a proper to writing, it does not reside in the mother tongue, but in some sort of fatherland from which one has come and toward which one goes, not a real country but a fatherland of the mind to which a proper inscription is wholly related. Writing in French means becoming part of the French language, langue instead of parole. French is also that which fills him, completes him, and makes him, as nothing else could, that unmarked and uncircumcised being of plentitude; he dwells in French as French dwells in him.