Affective capture: Can Cléo Cohen make Arabic a Jewish language again?

Axelle Houbani, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Film director Cléo Cohen opens her documentary Que Dieu te Protège (May God be with you, 2021, Petit à Petit Production) filming herself, holding a Tunisian Arabic textbook from the Assimil method in her hands. She is repeating greetings and their French translations. In her documentary, podcasts and public presentations of her productions, Cohen emphasises on the importance of speaking Tunisian Arabic as the cornerstone of her Jewish-Arab identity. For her, speaking this Arabic dialect is an index of a decolonial, Maghrebian, and even anti-Zionist Jewish identity. However, these indexicalities are often challenged by Cohen's audience, especially by Jewish Arabic-speakers born in the Maghreb and who left their home countries in the 50s and the 60s after the Maghreb's independence and the first Arab-Israeli wars. For these speakers of Arabic dialects, their language is also an important characteristic of their identity, albeit for very different reasons. So what does Cléo Cohen, a Jewish dialectal Arabic speaker (or learner), do to her Maghrebi and Maghrebi-descent public in postcolonial and post Oct-7 France?

In the case of Cléo Cohen and her Arabic-speaking Jewish audience, analysing the importance of Arabic in terms of identity or indexicality is not sufficient. Identity as a scientific concept (see  Brubacker, Cooper, 2000 for definitions) just does not work: people born in the Maghreb, exposed to dialectal Arabic in their youth and family, who underwent an upward social mobility process in France can react both extremely positively or negatively to Cohen's public presentation of her works. Analysing Cohen's use of and metadiscourses on dialectal Arabic through indexicality works better but does not help much: it indexes too many contradictory things at the same time, such as a specific Jewish heritage that diverges from Ashkenazi Jews, a migratory history close to non-Jewish North-African migrants' in France, a position "in between colonizers and colonizeds" (Memmi, 1957), and virtually any political position regarding Zionism to name a few. 

Just like her audience, Cohen has been exposed to dialectal Arabic all her life but this language can be something very different for her and part of her audience depending on how they have been affected (Spinoza 1677) by it. Cohen is well aware of the contradictory indexicalities and affects that this language can take on and she sometimes voluntarily provokes her audience to know what dialectal Arabic provokes in them. By doing so, she makes affects visible, directs them towards her as a person, and affects her audience back. What affects emerge from Cohen co-presence (Bauman 2016) with her audience? How does she capture these contradictory affects?

The chapter focuses in particular on Cohen's role as a ‘captator’ (Lordon 2015:109) of affects and how she manages to redistribute them to her audience. According to Lordon, ‘The captator is the one who inserts himself into the upward and downward circulation of the potentia multitudinis, and manages to make people forget its upward phase by leading them to believe that he is the origin of its downward phase.’ (Lordon 2015:109). This definition of the captator first refers to the confiscation of power from ‘subjects’ by 'their leaders' in a political context (Lordon 2015:111). Following Bauman's analysis of William Jennings Bryan's "aura" and co-presence with his audience during two presidential races (2016), I argue that Cohen's co-presence with her audience makes her a captator. The way Cohen has been affected by dialectal Arabic provokes more (positive or negative) reactions from her audience than with other Jewish Arabic speakers (see also carnet de terrain 01/feb/23). Meeting with her allows for every contradictory affects surrounding Arabic language to emerge and be directed towards her. Two questions are left unanswered: does this capture change what co-presence with Arabic does to people? Does she succeed in redistributing those affects in a new, positive form?

By focusing in particular on the moment of capture and redistribution of affects, this chapter provides a better understanding not only of how a language becomes an institution, but more broadly, of how affects circulate. Based on ethnographic fieldwork from February and November 2023 during Cohen's public presentations of her work, I suggest that Cohen successfully captures and mostly redistributes positive affects on dialectal Arabic as a Jewish language.