Reading Signs and Symbols with Abdelkébir Khatibi: From the Body to the Text

This chapter considers the ways in which Khatibi’s practices of reading contribute to theories of meaning through his thinking on the deciphering of signs and symbols and of making sense of the world, and of the worlds of the text, in their multifaceted forms. It takes as its starting point what Khatibi terms ‘l’intersémiotique’ in his introductory essay entitled ‘Le Cristal du Texte’ in La Blessure du nom propre, an important collection of essays for a better understanding of his work published in 1974. The ‘intersemiotic’ concerns migrant signs which move between one sign system and another, and Khatibi takes as his own project examples from semiotic systems found within Arabic and Islamic cultures, from both popular culture, such as the tattoo, to calligraphy and the language of the Quran, from the body, including the place of the erotic, to the text and beyond – including storytelling, mosaics, urban space, textiles. His readings reveal the intersemiotic and polysemic meanings created in the movements of these migrant signs between their sign systems. For Khatibi, this ‘infinity’ of the ‘text’ is linked also to mobile and migrant identity refracted in the multifaceted surfaces of the crystal (hence the title of the theoretical introductory essay – ‘Le Cristal du Texte’) rather than in one reflection as in a mirror. Moving from these concerns through and with which Khatibi develops his radical theory of the sign, of the word and of writing, and from the ways in which these concerns are reflected in the example of his own autobiographical text La Mémoire tatouée, the chapter goes on to investigate how Khatibi’s reading strategies may help the reading of other writers with a shared, but varied, relationship to their Islamic heritage. To do this, it takes another precise example in a work by the Algerian writer Assia Djebar whose writing, like that of many other twentieth and twenty-first century North African writers, is resonant with Khatibi’s intersemiotic theoretical and cultural project, and is concerned also with the individual and the collective, the historical and the contemporary, the political, the social and the linguistic. The chapter ends, then, by considering the implications of Khatibi’s reading and writing strategies for writers working with and through an Islamic heritage and significantly, as for Khatibi, the Sufi Islamic heritage