Intertextuality and Trauma

This article argues that Kamel Daoud's Meursault, contre-enquête is not a thematic rewriting of Albert Camus's L’Étranger but a struggle to reconfigure what Jacques Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible.” Applying a method of sensory archaeology, it investigates suppressed colonial trauma in Camus's text. It analyzes how Daoud contrapuntally reshapes L’Étranger 's core sensory motifs—the sun, beach, and name—to transform Meursault's metaphysical absurd into a sensible, historical trauma. Daoud displaces Camus's philosophical sensory system with a traumatic sensory system, forging an embodied register for the previously unseen victim. The novel's tragic structure reveals the contagion of colonial violence, converting Camus's philosophical monologue into an ethical testimony that demands a response.

Absurdism · Colonialism · Embodied cognition · Intertextuality · Rewriting · Sensory system · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Critical Theory and Political Philosophy · North African History and Literature