This essay is an account of my engagement with Abdelkébir Khatibi's writings on “aimance.” I came to them seeking a model for gender equity, then became profoundly disappointed when his practice of aimance did not live up to the equity the theory proposed. Seeking an explanation for the disparity between theory and practice, I was pleasantly surprised to discover gender-equitable aimance where I least expected it, and, in turn, a glimmer of the explanation I sought.

In Khatibi's view, aimance is at once an emotional bond and a writerly practice that improves on the conventions of romantic love. Aimance both encompasses and eclipses love; it is “cette autre langue d'amour” (“that other language of love”) that acknowledges the existence of the “opposition” between love and hatred even as it “affirme une affinité plus active entre les êtres” (“affirms a more active affinity between beings”) that transcends that opposition (“L'aimance” 128). Aimance potentially subverts patriarchal norms; more precisely, it is a signifying mode capable of actualizing affinities between differently gendered beings when those affinities cannot be actualized under patriarchal norms.Footnote ¹ As such, it may serve as either an alternative or a complement to the sexual expression of romantic love.Footnote ²

Khatibi proposes aimance as the guiding principle of a new era of equality in intimate relationships:

Aimance replaces the patriarchal hierarchy of lover and beloved (amant and aimée) with the gendered pair of lover and lover (“aimantes” and “aimants”). Instead of encouraging volatile aspirations to fusion that inevitably result in fission, aimance subsists in tender relationships of continuity: in desire and thought residing beside each other; in well-matched bodies engaging in gentle, reciprocal touch.Footnote ⁴ Such “receptive attraction” between aimants and aimantes recalls the proximate phenomenon signified by the verb aimanter (“to magnetize”), which describes the subterranean force that draws entities together. By attending to the invisible force of aimance, aimantes and aimants engage in a disposition of receptive inviting of the other to draw closer to the self.

The practice of aimance, as Khatibi historicizes it, arose from exchanges between European and Arab world literary traditions and thus exemplifies and grounds cultural plurality. He traces aimance to the European tradition of courtly love and its subversion of the contemporary clerical hegemony, especially through interventions from Arab culture. In a comparative analysis of courtly love poetry with the diwan of Ibn Quzmān, Khatibi argues that troubadour poetry was a “transposition” of the ghazal popular in Islamic Spain—a transposition of rhyme schemes as much as of thematics (“L'aimance” 130).Footnote ⁵ He also discusses the equivalence between the Arabic word maḥabba and the French word aimance: both bear witness to a multiplicity of desires, ranging from friendship to love to physical desire (131). The fastidious reproduction of feudal social codes in courtly love poetry, such as the maintenance of the lady's anonymity, lead Khatibi to classify it as “un idiome” (“an idiom”), one that served to keep the disciplinary action of the church at bay (130). This idiom also enabled a subversion of patriarchy that could grant equitable agency to women: Khatibi cites the female troubadour Maria de Ventadorn, who wrote that a lady should give herself to her lover as if to a friend, not as if to a master (130). In Khatibi's view, it was precisely the multicultural, multilingual, interfaith origins of courtly love that allowed it to emerge as a protected form of freedom of expression for aimantes and aimants whose interactions would otherwise have been repressed.

It bears noting, however, that Khatibi's texts tend toward reinforcing patriarchal norms, particularly concerning gendered divisions of labor, emotional and otherwise. Even as Dédicace à l'année qui vient (Dedication to the Coming Year; 1986) invites aimants and aimantes to engage in relational equilibrium, the poem's framing narrative relies heavily on traditional gender roles. It features an omniscient male speaker, a kind of master of ceremonies, who addresses the initiates as “beaux esprits” (“beautiful spirits”) and guides them toward Aimance, while personifying Aimance as an ephemeral, out-of-reach, muse-like feminine presence, “the giving one” who “ravishes” the narrator's “gaze”:

The section titled “Notes de mémoire” (“Notes from Memory”) in Par-dessus l’épaule (Over the Shoulder; 1988), written in separate sections for women and men, hovers ambivalently between description and prescription of strictly divided gendered behaviors in aimance. “Notes pour les femmes” (“Notes for Women”) clings to essentialist images of feminine arts such as carpet weaving and emphasizes the materiality and exoticism of women's appearance (13–16), whereas “Notes pour les hommes” (“Notes for Men”) relies on a dichotomy that associates women with an “interior secret” and men with its exterior “poetic enunciation” (159) and explores subjective states like melancholy and jealousy exclusively from the male point of view (164–65). One particularly fetishistic passage from “Notes pour les femmes” describes an aimant's wonder at the profound origins of his jouissance in his aimante's womanhood, a recognition of and stupefaction at the historicity of women's handmade, handwoven construction of womanhood, passed down for millennia:

The speaker demonstrates the ability to evoke, even in the presence of a single woman, what we might consider an imaginary of the harem sublime in his realization that he is benefitting from the collective efforts of generations of women embodied in this one woman, the pinnacle of multiple harems’ efforts to please men.Footnote ⁶

The section titled “Apostille” (“Marginalia”), which directly follows “Notes pour les femmes,” comes across as quite defensive, as if Khatibi anticipated a negative reaction to the “Notes.” It is rife with rhetorical questions that indicate the author's self-doubt. He argues that women's resistance to patriarchy has become essential to gender relations and gender identity: “Sinon, comment comprendre qu'un homme soit possible sans cette résistance du sensible? Oui, qu'est-ce qu'un homme sans sa féminité retenue?” (“If not, how could manhood be possible without this resistance to the sensuous? Yes, what is a man without his restrained femininity?”; 41). Even as he touts economic, legal, and political equality between the sexes, Khatibi argues that the relations between the sexes are inherently asymmetrical and expresses concern that the equality of women and men could lead to the dissolution of the family hierarchy (44). Though he emphasizes his attachment to gendered and familial hierarchies, he never explains why he believes they are so necessary.

Khatibi makes greater strides toward a more equitable practice of aimance in his Correspondance ouverte (Open Correspondence) with the Moroccan psychoanalyst and author Ghita El Khayat. Published in 2005, their fifty-nine letters exchanged between 1995 and 1999 provide a real-life example of Khatibi engaging in a relationship of aimance. Khatibi and El Khayat have much in common: Parisian educations; interests in psychoanalysis, art, and travel; and the ongoing challenge of balancing their dual careers in literature and the social sciences. Yet Khatibi's motivation for the correspondence—which is to say, the practice of aimance—is not fully shared by El Khayat. It is he alone who returns again and again to the theme of aimance, whereas she is mostly content to contemplate their relationship in terms of amitié, or friendship (e.g., El Khayat and Khatibi 9–11, 71–73). Their correspondence becomes especially moving after the death of El Khayat's young daughter in 1997 (64 and following).Footnote ⁷ Khatibi accompanies El Khayat through her grief with kindness and generosity, responding to her sorrow but continuing to inform her about his activities in order to keep her grounded in the present reality of the living world and to encourage her not to give in to her despair. In this way he styles himself as a male protector who, having himself suffered many losses early in life, advises her from the wisdom of his experience. The contrast between their situations becomes increasingly stark: the grieving mother works through her mourning at home in Casablanca, whereas the jet-setting intellectual father leaves the kids at home with his wife.

The aporia between Khatibi's gender-equitable theorization and his less gender-equitable practice of aimance can be partially explained by his investment in understanding, promoting, and critiquing Islamic culture, including its patriarchal traditions, from within.Footnote ⁸ His literary, philosophical, and sociological approaches to understanding sexuality and gender in Islamic contexts emphasize the influence of faith-based interpretations of sacred narratives. Khatibi's approach to questions of sexuality therefore always returns to the primacy of Allah's role in creation. The sexualization of Adam and Eve is only a secondary effect of the main story of Iblis, or Satan, disobeying Allah (Par-dessus 90–111). In “La sexualité selon le Coran” (“Sexuality according to the Qur'an”), Khatibi similarly argues that questions of sexual and marital conduct in daily Islamic life are secondary to the belonging of creation to Allah (Maghreb pluriel 147–76; Plural Maghreb 95–116). Khatibi's partial feminism valorizes women's traditional cultural contributions to Islamic culture, beginning with Khadija's role as intermediary between Mohammed and the Angel who brought him the first verses of the Qur'an (Par-dessus 84–85).Footnote ⁹ The last two sentences of the back-cover description of Correspondance ouverte frame the text as a groundbreaking event in the Arab world: “Nous appartenons ainsi à la civilisation islamique et à son système social patriarcal. Cet échange est peut-être le premier dans le genre, publié dans le monde arabe . . .” (“Thus we belong to Islamic civilization and to its patriarchal social system. This exchange is perhaps the first of its kind to be published in the Arab world . . .”). Khatibi seems content to propose that aimance may temporarily subvert Islamic patriarchy (or any and all forms of patriarchy), but never overthrow it; in so doing, he reinforces its hegemony. From the vantage point of 2022 and its attendant globalized feminisms, it is difficult not to find Khatibi's practical forays into aimance unsatisfying.Footnote ¹⁰

Yet heteronormative patriarchal relations between men and women are not the endpoint of Khatibi's exploration of aimance. He cites his contemporary Rezvani, an author of Russian and Iranian origin writing in French, who invents the term aimanciper, a neologism that combines aimance and émanciper (“to emancipate”), deployed in the phrase “qu'aimance nous aimancipe” (“may aimance aimancipate us”; Rezvani, “Aimance”). Khatibi hopes this unique aspect of Rezvani's idiolect will become a more widespread idiom (“L'aimance” 138–39). Khatibi doesn't elaborate on its potential significance, leaving it up to his readers to consider how the poetics of aimance might motivate practices of political liberation, or “aimancipation.” In what follows, I explore how Le livre du sang (The Book of Blood; 1979) demonstrates aimance's potential, within a strictly heteronormative patriarchy, and even perhaps because of it, to motivate queer aimancipations.

Over the course of this mythic fantasy, delivered in unrelentingly emotionally heightened prose, the Asylum of the Inconsolable—located somewhere between heaven and earth—suffers its downfall, apparently as an effect of the presence of two figures alternately identified as androgynous and sexed, the Échanson, or Cupbearer, and his sister Muthna. This downfall seems particularly inevitable after the “Nuit de l'erreur” (“The Night That Went Astray”), in which the Échanson and Muthna engage in an incestuous encounter from which they and their community, at once a parodic representation of a Sufi order and an allegory for Islamic patriarchy, will never recover.

Readings of Le livre du sang have rightly pointed out its deconstructive qualities; in particular, they emphasize the relationship between the self-dissolving tendencies of its narrative structure and that of the social and epistemological orders it represents. Réda Bensmaïa views Le livre du sang as an “attempt to rewrite and surpass” the literary tradition of Islamic mysticism that has dangerously veered toward “decadence” (136, 137). Characterizing the book as an “unreadable” “text of bliss” (137), or Barthesian jouissance, that disrupts readerly expectations and tends “to exceed any inscription of plot,” Bensmaïa equates the collapse of the asylum to the collapse of the narrative itself (138). Nasrin Qader observes that though Muthna and the Échanson threaten the purity to which the Asylum's fraternity aspires, that purity was always precarious, because the walled structure of the asylum creates an inside/outside binary that is always at risk of transgression (172). She argues that the denial of embodied materiality structures the downfall of both the asylum and the plot. The fraternity's aspiration to achieve transcendence by gazing upon the Échanson's beautiful face exemplifies the novel's paradoxical quest to erase materiality through contact with materiality, as well as the fraternity's need to determine the Échanson's and Muthna's sex and gender identities, and its frustration with that impossibility. That these structured impossibilities lead to their murder exemplifies the same paradox (154–56, 167).

These readings unquestioningly accept that Khatibi is instrumentalizing the problematic of gender nonconformism only to critique ideologies of spiritual and cultural purity. I would like to gesture toward a different reading, one centered on the Échanson's and Muthna's life stories as representative of transgender and gender-nonconforming persons’ experiences of aimance, aimancipation, or the lack thereof. I have not encountered any evidence that Khatibi intentionally wrote Le livre du sang as an allegorical account of the lived reality of transgender or gender-nonconforming persons at any specific historical moment or place, nor would I anachronistically attribute this terminology to him. Yet, in the context of the global rise of LGBTQ activism in the four decades since the book's publication,Footnote ¹¹ the text's vision of the relationship between transgender and gender-nonconforming identities and heteronormative patriarchy merits further investigation.

From this perspective, Le livre du sang, which alternates between novelistic testimony and theatrical dialogue, narrates the social marginalization of two transgender characters, offering both a critique of gender normativity and an articulation of solidarity with transgender and gender-nonconforming persons. The siblings suffer violence and sexual trauma in childhood, their father is slain by a poisoned sword, and their mother is transported “le cul en l'air” (“ass in the air”; 127) to the heavens. Thereafter, they are reared by a slapdash foster care system of increasingly irresponsible relatives, and the path of Muthna's life is littered with crimes and destruction, including her kidnapping and rape at the age of eleven in front of her brother (127–30, 149). Because of the Échanson's perfect beauty, which encompasses both masculinity and femininity, the Asylum's fraternity has chosen the Échanson to be the Cupbearer, whereas Muthna is relegated to sex work (141–43, 149).Footnote ¹²

The text's turning point, the “nuit de l'erreur,” takes place during the height of Carnival, a season of temporary social transgressions. Muthna leads the Échanson away from the street festivities to engage in an incestuous encounter, which leads to the only orgasm of Muthna's life (149–50). We can read their incest and Muthna's climax as a sacred instance of aimance. This love scene is representative of the tendency of transgender and gender-nonconforming persons to seek one another out for intimate or “aimant” relationships because the commonality of their experiences are grounds for understanding and trust (Erickson-Roth 338–39).

Although, as previously mentioned, Le livre du sang does not engage explicitly with theories of transgender and gender-nonconforming identity, the novel does reflect on the meaning and phenomenology of the terms it uses to characterize the Échanson's and Muthna's gender and sexuality: androgyny and hermaphroditism. The narrative proposes a hermaphroditic description of an androgynous person's body (142), and the narrator, empathizing with the Cupbearer, expresses anger and envy at not being fully androgynous but “tournant autour de ma verge déracinée” (“spinning around my uprooted penis”; 142–43) and describes the Échanson, also identified in the text as “l'Androgyne” (“the Androgyne”), as the “dépouille d'un corps angélique, abandonné sur terre par les dieux antiques” (“cadaver of an angelic body, abandoned on earth by the ancient gods”; 149). Khatibi later calls attention to androgyny as an original condition steeped in myth—the condition that precedes sexuality, for Adam was originally an androgynous figure, not sexed until Eve was created (Par-dessus 98). In reflections on Le livre du sang, Khatibi emphasizes that the separation of the androgynous being into two sexed beings is the origin of suffering, of passion (Langue 79), suggesting the sibling-lovers’ incest is an attempt to restore their original wholeness. Khatibi thus consistently envisions androgyny as an original, holistic human condition before the advent of heteronormative sexual and gender dualism. Reading the semi-androgynous characters of the Échanson and Muthna as transgender or gender-nonconforming aligns with this vision, and the consummation of their incestuous desire enacts their spiritual desire to connect to a selfhood beyond the social construction of gender binarism.

In the aftermath of their incestuous aimance, the Échanson exhibits suicidal ideations.Footnote ¹³ Caught in a devolutionary mirror stage, he regards his reflection without recognizing himself, believing that he's watching himself die (Livre 177). That is, gazing at his reflection is no longer an act that constitutes or recuperates his identity, but rather this act of gazing allows him to bear witness to its disintegration. Unlike her brother, Muthna seeks social acceptance. She wishes to prolong her feeling of wholeness by taking the Échanson's place in the fraternity: she wills herself to be both herself and her brother (182). She engages in survival tactics, both by eliminating enemies, poisoning the “Disciple” who consistently rails against her presence among the refugees (183), and by seeking out alliances with power, taking the Asylum's Master as her lover (186–87). Yet all attempts at social acceptance are doomed to failure within the fraternity's exclusionary structure. Enraged by the indeterminacy of the Échanson's and Muthna's genders, the asylum inhabitants slit their throats under the gaze of the Master, who vengefully flays their veins (200–01). It is perhaps not surprising that transgender or gender-nonconforming characters would be brutally killed by a patriarchal order that views them as a threat.Footnote ¹⁴ However, this double murder also marks the beginning of the end—the limit—of heteronormative patriarchy itself. The fraternity cannot accept the existence of the Échanson and Muthna, but the very act of excluding them precipitates the dissolution of the fraternity in the physical destruction of the Asylum and the death of its inhabitants.

Although the fraternity's dissolution marks the destruction of the social order, it is not an unwelcome textual development. The double protagonists’ story is one of struggle toward queer aimancipation: their sacrifice reveals that it is gender binarism that constitutes the heteronormative patriarchy's fault line. By narrating a transgender and gender-nonconforming struggle as the violent, apocalyptic endpoint of heteronormative, patriarchal structures of exclusion, Le livre du sang challenges us to imagine how social acceptance of gender-nonconforming aimance could usher in a nonviolent, postapocalyptic starting point of sexual egalitarianism, pangender equity, and nonhierarchical inclusivity.

Khatibi's relation to aimance is instructive in both its failures and its successes. Why does he fail at aimance when he's actively trying to succeed, yet succeed when aimance isn't even fully on his mind yet? Whereas Poésie de l'aimance and other aimance-centric texts take for granted the predominance of cisgender men and women and their traditional gender roles, aimance happens at the moment when Khatibi is most critical of the foundations of Islamic society, both its hierarchical spirituality and its gender binarism. This paradox reveals the radical demands that aimance places on those who would make it their ethical praxis, and aimancipation their model of political liberation.