In her autobiographical writings (e.g. Les rêveries de la femme sauvage and the exquisite "texte inédit" entitled "Pieds nus" included in the collection of memoirs edited by Leïla Sebbar, Une enfance algérienne, Hélène Cixous positions herself at the tension-ridden boundary between insider and outsider in relation to her native Algeria. Although born and raised in Oran during the Vichy regime, as the daughter of a Sephardic Jew of Spanish origin and a Austro-Hungarian Ashkenazi Jew, Cixous recognizes the multiple markers of Otherness (gender, class, religion, ethnicity) that constituted her exclusion, not only from Algerian society but also from the hegemonic privileges of French colonialism. At the same time, with the paradoxical gesture that defines her writing as a deconstructive political act, she acknowledges the circumstances of her personal history that have made her immutably "inséparabe."

Among the scènes primitives that drive home so forcefully both the personal and collective implications of her complex non-identity ("the verb to be always bothered me") is the memory of a terrible accident she witnessed at the age of seven in which the body of a young Arab girl was cut in two when her veil became caught in the mechanism of a carrousel. Unable to block out the sight or sound of this horrifying death, Cixous places the incident in a broader political context that underscores the imbrication of culpability and shared responsibility in what appears to be immutable difference: "Je ne suis pas morte. Il y a faute. Et c'est ma faute obscurément. Jai vu la jeune fille folle en feu voilée follement attachée à son voile sauter hors du feu dans le gouffre. Cest une tragédie qui est aussi une Ville, un pays, une histoire, l'histoire de celle que je ne suis pas, un voile nous sépare et pour cette raison même je sens un voile tomber une buée rouge sur ma tête sur mes épaules, effrayée de toutes mes forces je me débats mais je ne le nie pas, pour rien au monde je ne le mettrais, et pour cette raison même malgré moi je porte une jeune fille voilée que je ne suis pas, j'ai en moi la fille coupée en deux le voile mortel la coupure parce que je suis une fille témoin de la victime, coupée de la victime.

In my presentation, I propose to draw upon current postcolonial and gender theories to analyze the way in which Cixous inscribes her dislocation in Algeria as an intensely personal experience that nevertheless has significant historical dimensions. As she incorporates Freudian theory ("il y a du vouloir dans le 'en vouloir'") and Derridean practices of textual liberation into her writing, the dualism, or proliferation of dualisms she observes ("il y avait tant de deux mondes") is forced continually to confront a fragile pluralism that stubbornly resists the deadly violence of blind allegiance.