La politique de l’injure. Une décennie meurtrière en Algérie

• Main Author: Abderrahmane Moussaoui
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université de Provence 2004-06-01
• Series: Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/remmm/1204

Insults very often precede and/or supplant physical aggression. In a conflict situation insults could be considered as the ultimate in violence. In a decade of political violence in Algeria, people are not so much affected by death itself as they are by the humiliation their bodies sustained before death and their corpses thereafter. Emasculation has a special status. The insult, which consists in « feminizing » the other, relates in fact to the meaning of honor, which is the prerogative of men; men are the exclusive holders and principal guardians of honor. Insults therefore, are not mere verbalizations, they are tangible physical acts deeply felt. By forcing upon others a behavior viewed as contextually or ethically obscene, the insult can be perceived as inflicting a form of moral torture. Instances such as forcing a husband to witness his wife’s rape, or a father his daughter’s, or the shaving of a woman’s head while forcing her to live naked among rebels, constitute as many fatal insults for those who sustain them. More than physical injury to the victim, these insults are also fatal to the person’s referent group.