Diasporic subject: between attempt at integration and temptation to fundamentalism, reading in ‘Ce vain Combat que tu livres au Monde’ of Fouad Laroui

Abstract

This article proposes to explore through Fouad Laroui’s novel Ce vain combat que tu livre au Monde (Laroui, 2016) the different identity transformations of a diasporic subject in direct contact with immediate History. Its destiny is unfolding against the backdrop of an overmediatization of fierce and virulent debates, which draw the faces of a France inhabited by the specter of identity wars ((Blanchard et al., 2016), and faces a historical remanence which leaves profile how “identity ankyloses” (Shayegan, 1989, p. 5) that punctuate the present time are indebted to the “past that strives to emerge from the present” (Ashcroft et al., 2012, p. 50). Fouad Laroui seizes on the attacks that struck the heart of Paris in 2015 to open up analytical perspectives capable of informing us not only about certain conflicts that cross today’s multicultural society, but also about the means likely to reduce them. Thus, he invites us to read and reflect on the different interactions that a diasporic subject operates with the vagaries of a disrupted geopolitics and offers us a romantic explanation of a character whose life will capsize between the ardent desire to i integration into secular French society and the integrist temptation that unfolds in the theocratic society illustrated in its most monstrous face by the Islamic State.