Hadj-Moussa 267indeed such a thing as Algerian society, or if there is nothing left but the
state, at once benefactor and destroyer of a society that has ceased to exist.
The argument can be carried further. If the state is located in opposition
to society, then to divorce the two would mean they have no bearing on
one another. By divesting the analysis of the burden of the “ghost of the
state”^11 we can think of the political in new ways. We can conceive of daily
practices as springboards that also lead to the political. Feminist theory for
quite some time has cast a critical eye on the divisions between public and
private space and has demonstrated that these divisions are creations of
bourgeois regimes that have been reproduced in theories of public space, as
in Habermas, among others.^12 Although these feminist theories do recog-
nize the validity of the concept of a normative dimension in regards to pub-
lic space, as Habermas suggested, they underscore the exclusion of women
from public spaces as a constituent of bourgeois public space. This means
that the space for intellectual exchange and deliberation is constructed by
way of a space made absent; but it is certainly not made to disappear.
oreover, what is one to do with the case of the private sphere M
engendered by television or of the public spaces it may generate? A num-
ber of authors address the difficulty of maintaining these separations, not
only because television has been at the forefront of creating a sense of
belonging and national cohesion,^13 but also because the private sphere is
restructured by the advent of television. Does this mean that “home” is
no longer a private space? By virtue of the introduction of a public instru-
ment, does the domestic sphere come to occupy a place no longer in par-
allel with the “outside” but a place articulated in relation to the outside
that is connected to it in various fashions? In particular, does “mediated
publicness” in the context of nondemocratic situations create not so much
the “almost publics”^14 of television audiences as publics that are poised
for potential action? Only partial and open-ended answers can be given
to these questions. The first reason for this is that television is not the
only territory through which publicness materializes; the second is that
the response from actors is not a political response in the sense of a con-
sidered set of demands aimed at the transformation of institutions.
hat Lucas and Neveu note in the case of citizenship, Querrien W
notes in “Un art des centres et des banlieues”: that public space is not
a given and that “community does not prefigure public space and does