The awarding of the Prix Goncourt in 2024 for his novel Houris This led to fierce attacks against Kamel Daoud. The author writes that this prize resulted in the revival of the traitor stereotype with "unprecedented violence" in the Islamist-conservative press. The press even exploited the imperfect homonymy of his name (Daoud) with that of the mythical traitor Colonel Bendaoud to the point of exaggeration in order to discredit him. The attacks served to once again label him a renegade, dissident, and deserter because he had abandoned the "we" for the eternally French "they" ("eux"). The polemical defense of freedom and pluralism in Il faut parfois trahir can be understood as a direct and profound intellectual response to these renewed defamations and the associated identitarian orthodoxy.
Kamel Daoud's treatise Il faut parfois trahir (Gallimard, 2025) presents a passionate, thesis-driven defense of universalism and individual freedom, sharply criticizing those forces he sees as guardians of national stagnation and the cult of identity. The argument revolves around the paradoxical reversal of the concept of "betrayal," which becomes the vehicle for liberation.
Content
The Theology of Betrayal: A Necessary Liberation
The title Il faut parfois trahir (Sometimes one must betray) is both program and thesis. Daoud's betrayal is not a moral transgression, but an act of movement, of insight, and of daring. He himself hopes to be a traitor in order to become a worthy ancestor. The author justifies this with the historical necessity of overcoming stagnation and argues that betrayal reveals the truth. He writes:
Suis-je donc un traitre? You can also see my console in the pages of the historical books: all the heroes on the property. All the prophets come from the époque and a desert window. At night, all the éclaireurs are obligated to take the lens of the leurs. Tous les hommes ont dû trahir la peur.
Am I a traitor, then? Perhaps, but I console myself by leafing through history books: all heroes betrayed immobility. All prophets had to betray their era and a jealous desert. In the night, all enlightened thinkers are forced to betray the slowness of their own. All people had to betray fear.
Daoud's betrayal is thus the price of freedom and the preservation of the real against the imaginary. He sees betrayal as a form of translation: "trahir, c'est traduire" (to betray means to translate, likely from the Italian "traduttore, traditore"). This interpretation suggests that betrayal is synonymous with revelation, clarification, taking a risk, and venturing into the unknown. This betrayal is also the "desertion" from the stagnation of the "we."
The cult of the dead and the rejection of the individual
Daoud vehemently opposes intellectuals of the South who believe themselves to be in a perpetual state of decolonization and reduce history to a fragment of their own suffering. His opponents derive their identity from the cult of the dead, while Daoud defends the living. He criticizes this clinging to memory.
Or, the memory is not in a house, but in a fireplace. On the traverse for interrogator, pas pour demeurer.
But memory is not a house, it is a path. One traverses it to ask questions, not to linger.
He demands that we love the present and defends the harvests against those who only want to know the roots. Instead of allowing ourselves to be defined by the bones of the dead, we must prove ourselves through the flesh of the living. This rejection of the necrophilic fixation on the past is the prerequisite for any progress.
The demand for plurality and emancipation
Daoud's demands are in direct opposition to the dogmas of his opponents. He advocates for the plurality of knowledge and for a multilingual identity:
Contre ceux qui supposent qu'un livre suffit pour expliquer le monde, j'ai opté pour mille livres pour garder au monde le droit au dernier mot. Les hommes d'un seul livre ne sont jamais afffranchis.
Against those who believe that a single book is enough to explain the world, I have chosen a thousand books, so that the world may have the last word. People who know only one book are never free.
He defends his own three languages as windows that illuminate his house. Above all, however, Daoud demands the emancipation of women as a necessary condition for the freedom of the people.
J'ai répété mille fois: 'lorsque les femmes sont emprisonnées, les hommes se retrouvent condamnés'.
I have repeated a thousand times: 'If the women are imprisoned, the men will find themselves condemned.'
Daouda calls for questioning (“interrogation”) instead of blind faith. He strives for a literature of proclamation (“littérature de l'annonciation”), not of denunciation or renunciation.
The opponent: The ideology of Arabité and the haters
Daoud's main opponents are the Algerian conservatives, Islamists, and identitarians who claim a monopoly on "pure" identity. They label anyone who advocates universal values such as modernity, gender equality, or plurality a traitor because these values are branded as irrevocably French ("irrémédiablement françaises"). These identity guardians assert that hating France is a matter of faith ("haïr la France est une croyance"), and they exploit the ideologized Arabité as a political instrument of power.
A central rhetorical tool of his opponents is the myth of Colonel Bendaoud, the first Algerian graduate of Saint-Cyr. They revive the mythical and apocryphal narrative: An Arab remains an Arab, even if his name is Colonel Bendaoud! ("Un Arabe reste un Arabe, même s'il s'appelle le colonel Bendaoud!") This phrase is used to demonstrate the impossibility of assimilation and the inevitability of Arab identity. This mythical betrayal by Bendaoud, similar to Judas's betrayal in the "Cène" (Last Supper), serves to justify any breach of national unity (unanimityto brand it as an eternal shame. This freezes history in a single, unchanging moment. Daoud deciphers this as a political act:
The work, told of the imagination in Algérie, is in this scene totémique the demonstration of the vérité that competes in the reality of Algérienne and its histoires…
The Arabité, as imagined in Algeria, completes in this totemic scene the demonstration of its truth, which calls into question Algerian reality and its histories…
The conflict between uniformity and plurality
Daoud's entire argument is based on the contrast between enforced uniformity in the South and liberating plurality in the North.
The unification (unité/unanimitéIn the Maghreb, unity is experienced as a ferocious temptation ("tentation féroce de l'unité"), which is monotonous, unanimous, and identity-based. This unity is built on the principle of opposition ("contre") and refusal. Daoud describes the attitude of the South:
Au Sud s'affirme aujourd'hui the tentation féroce de l'unité. Nous devons faire front, crie le leader, être unis, expresser une seule voix, former un seul corps, être le "nous", incarner la même personne.
In the south, the fierce temptation of unity is being reinforced today. We must present a united front, shouts the leader, be united, express a single voice, form a single body, embody the "we," incarnate the same person.
This demand for unanimity kills free will.
In contrast, plurality is inextricably linked to betrayal, as it breaks down rigid unity. Plurality manifests itself as hybridity, complexity, and ambiguity. Daoud identifies as a proponent of plurality ("partisan de la pluralité") and sees his trilingualism as an asset. Plurality signifies movement and nomadism.
Toute trahison se décline en pluralité, ambiguïté, complexity. Elle résume the baroque de la vie. Elle apparaît comme l'histoire en movement, alors on lui oppose l'histoire figée d'un instant.
Every betrayal manifests itself in plurality, ambiguity, and complexity. It encapsulates the baroque nature of life. It appears as history in motion, while being contrasted with the frozen history of a single moment.
For Daoud, Francophone culture is not a sign of colonization, but of true independence. It enables the leap into the universal ("saut vers l'Universel"). By using the language of the supposed colonizers, he liberates his soul from the ultimate decolonizers and proves that victory is possible even without war. Daoud's loyalty, therefore, lies with plurality.
Je suis infidèle à tout ce qui réduit ces deux pays à de l'absurdité et à de l'antagonisme. Je suis infidèle à la rigidité, à la fixité. Je suis infidèle à la vérité unique. Je suis infidèle au livre unique et à la langue unique. Je suis traître, et je suis partisan de la pluralité, de la multiplicité, de la variance et des pérégrinations.
I am disloyal to everything that reduces these two countries to absurdity and antagonism. I am disloyal to rigidity, to fixedness. I am disloyal to the one truth. I am disloyal to the one book and the one language. I am a traitor, and I am a supporter of plurality, diversity, variance, and migration.
Thus, Daoud's "betrayal" is an expression of the will to live, a call to desert the stagnation of identitarianism, and an affirmative response to the complexity of his French-Algerian identity. He argues that this plurality is Algeria's only chance to no longer define itself in an imaginary "contre" against the world, but rather to find its way to light, boldness, and vitality.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
