Khatibi’s Palimpsestic Reading of Genet

The Moroccan poet and sociologist Abdelkébir Khatibi often credited canonical French writers with the emergence of his decolonial thought. Through dialogues with Segalen, Mallarmé, Baudelaire, or Derrida, Khatibi’s eclectic reading practices sought to transform monologic conceptions of French literature and language, as vectors of epistemic hegemony or cultural domination, into spaces of intercultural alliance. This article sheds new light on the singular role Jean Genet played in Khatibi’s decolonization of French poetics. Drawing on unexamined correspondence between Genet and Khatibi ( Figures de l’étranger , 1987), and essays from Khatibi’s conference on Genet ( Féerie et dissidence , 2002), it explores how Khatibi creates a palimpsestic method of writing with Genet’s divisive classical French. Using Gérard Genette’s definition of the palimpsest as a form of ‘bricolage’, the article studies how Khatibi moves away from a conflictual relation to a master canon by situating him in a tradition of writers who uproot literature from proprietorial practices of meaning. Taking inspiration from Genet’s subversions of French from the inside and Mallarmé’s posture as a ‘syntaxier’, the article develops little-studied Khatibi concepts around the ‘creux’, the ‘classique’, and ‘bricolage’ as topology: a spatial practice of deformation, reconfiguration, and repair that eschews the identity principles of writing from a homeland. This article was published open access under a CC BY-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ .