Abdel-Fattah Kilito: The First Typing Errors

The Moroccan critic Abdel Fattah Kilito (1945) does not abandon the land of his ancestors. But each time, he widens the circle a little, looking at the text and his surroundings to discover the gaps in his previous reading. In his new book “In an Air of Intellectual Regret” (media publications), he presents the possibilities of the first reading. The privacy of writing, he says, “is linked to the quality of reading. What have you read? First of all, what was the first book you read? On each occasion I present a different title according to the mood of the moment, the turns of memory, and according to the person who asks me, their language and the literature to which they belong, so I suggest, and in fact I invent a first book, which I was created for the first time. Here we are before the issue of beginnings. You won’t settle for a definitive answer, asking, “Is there even a first time?” Most of the time, it is not so sure if it is about reading or other matters. As soon as we think of catching it, we discover, and perhaps occasionally or later, that it is preceded by another. The first time at the end is after the first and, at best, the second time.

Of course, Al-Jahiz will be present as a vital example of the meaning of tracing and uncovering the hidden, not only this time, but also in previous books such as the doorman of faces and locked in a writing method or style. The author of ‘The tongue of Adam’ indicates that “it was he who saved me from my feeling of inferiority when I realized that I could not, or rather did not want to complete a book in the sense of fulfilling a topic and persevering in it and keep going without turning left or right. He admits it himself and repeatedly apologizes … for what? I almost say that it is short, and what is short. He explains the matter because of the fear that the reader would be bored, and because he too was bored and tried to overcome it, and that is the secret of his successive digressions. Digressions that refer in the other’s dictionary to the French writer Montini, who used to write “jumping and jumping”, or going from one idea to another. Despite the richness and paradox of Abdel-Fattah Kilito’s blog, he is content with what the German philosopher Edmund Husserl used to say: “I consider myself happy if I can simply find a foothold here and there on a very small ground, in the misty and volatile swamps. ”
In this book and in others, the owner of the “Porters of the story” resorts to the maximum intensity, moving away from the fat of the paper, in the interrogatory silence to deconstruct the mysteries of the texts, with a critical lamp that illuminates the paths in front to the reader, hoping to discover the first writing errors, reformulating them, again and again, to erase the lapses and correct them. Since there is no complete writing, as there is no final reading. “This is how my writings remain when I reread them, sick texts that must be treated, with the certainty that the treatment has no end,” he says. Abdel Fattah Kilito’s exceptionalism, then, lies in his reverence for the position of the reader in the first place, and for his astonishing discoveries while wandering through the texts, to the point of borrowing the titles of some of his books from others, such as He does so in this book, relying on a phrase by Gaston Bashlar: “If we free ourselves from the past of errors, we are wrapping the truth in an atmosphere of intellectual repentance.”

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