Excerpts from Abdelkébir Khatibi, La Blessure du nom propre (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1974)

Both experimental intersemiotics and double critique define the scope of Abdelkébir Khatibi’s La Blessure du nom propre (‘The wound of the proper name’). Published in 1974, this work presents the distinctive way that Khatibi intervenes simultaneously in North African cultural studies and in French semiotics. The two excerpts here include the book’s introduction “The Text’s Crystal” and an excerpt from the chapter on calligraphy, “The Calligraphic Trace.” Translated into English for the first time, these excerpts exemplify Khatibi’s pioneering effort to reimagine Moroccan and Arab/Arabic cultural formations outside of both the colonial anthropological frame and the retrenched theocratic forms of national culture ascendant in the postcolonial world after decolonization. Also, in “The Calligraphic Trace,” Khatibi sets out to formulate an Arab/Arabic theory of the sign that, implicitly, can compete or contrast with European models of the same.