Fabricating Time, Inhabiting the Breach Algerian Extreme Contemporary Writing as a Poetics of Utopian Historicity Regimes

Résumé

— This article seeks to propose an operative definition of the “extreme contemporary” in Algerian novelistic writing, conceiving it as an narrative response to the presentist crisis—this temporal rupture and double debt theorized by Hartog (2003). Drawing on Ricœur’s hermeneutics, it shows how the novels of Adimi, Daoud, and Benfodil do not thematize the crisis but rather produce, through writing, utopian regimes of historicity. Linked to specific forms of knowledge (epic, mantic, testimonial), these regimes construct scriptural counter-societies and alternative temporalities: a third time of communal foundation, a poetic time of reparative liturgy, and a suspended time of the archaeology of chaos. The study concludes that this narrative fabrication of time dynamically constitutes a literary algerianity, defined as a creative process of inhabiting the rupture.