Édouard Glissant, Philosopher

Heraclitus and Hegel in the Whole-World

Alexandre Leupin, Andrew Brown

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781438483269, 9781438483252
• eBook ISBN: 9781438483276
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: French History

Translation of Alexandre Leupin's award-winning study of Édouard Glissant's entire work in relation to philosophy.

One of the greatest writers of the late twentieth century, Édouard Glissant's body of work covers multiple genres and addresses many cogent contemporary problems, such as borders, multiculturalism, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and global humanities. Édouard Glissant, Philosopher is the first study that maps out this writer's entire work in relation to philosophy. Glissant is reputed to be a "difficult writer;" however, Alexandre Leupin demonstrates the clarity and coherence of his thinking. Glissant's rereading of Western philosophy entirely remaps its age-old questions and offers answers that have never been proposed. In doing so, Glissant offers a new way to think about questions that are at the forefront of Global Humanities today: identity, race, communities, diasporas, slavery, nation-states and nationalism, aesthetics, ethics, and the place and function of poetry and art in a globalized world. This book will elucidate Glissant's theoretical writings, not only in England and in America but also in the anglophone Caribbean, Africa, and India.

Chapter 1

“The immense foliage of a Louisiana oak, like a flattened palaver tree”

On April 20, 2002, Édouard Glissant wrote a short text for me during a stay in Baton Rouge:1

On the Imaginary

It is what enables the concept to escape its enclosure,

in other words its own system.

It is what enables every community to escape its own enclosure to enter the non-systematic system of the Whole-World.

The Imaginary goes beyond what is said, what is lived, the concept,

in the dynamic movement of a poetics.

Today, I belatedly decipher, in this text addressed to me personally, an affable, firm, and delicate admonition not to allow myself to be confined within the concept and the system, but rather to question my training and my thinking. This is a formidable demand, one to which I have tried to respond in the present work.

But above all, the text goes far beyond its restricted address: these few lines sum up in an aphorism the totality of Édouard Glissant’s thought. There is something astounding about this ability to compose everything as a whole, so that the slightest fragment points to the entire path of his thought and brings it together in a synthesis. Each word in this terse text names all (or almost all) of the places opened up by the work in its entirety. Meditating retrospectively, in a painful absence, this poem in prose (is it a manifesto? a Heraclitean fragment? the preamble to a novel? a hymn? a minimal epic? a line of verse?—the form itself overrides the distinction between traditional literary genres), I see a massive, graceful coherence arise, with repercussions for all Glissant’s texts.

I thought that after the publication of the Entretiens de Baton Rouge, and after several articles and conference papers (which now strike me as quite inadequate), I had said everything I had to say about Édouard Glissant. But this was not the case: when he died, I was asked to give papers and interviews and to write articles, and I re-read the texts. His work then appeared to me much more systematic, rigorous, and nourished by certain traditions than I would have thought: it could be assessed anew—one just needed to come at it from a different angle.

In this regard, Sylvie Glissant often assured me, so as to help me overcome the many moments of asthenia that marked the writing of this book, that “Édouard knew that you would join him one day.” I have the somewhat uncanny realization that Glissant had made this explicit on the back cover of the Entretiens. He mentioned various reasons for this belated publication, seventeen years after the recording of our conversations: “Why so long after? Probably to give time to what we would both need to write or think, then and since, and to return to what we had so tranquilly discussed between ourselves, outside of any limit.” By some miracle, this time has been granted me; I must now give the results of this long lapse of time their opportunity—for it was, without my knowledge, a period of waiting and, beyond the grave, a response to Glissant’s wish or divination.

In many ways, this tribute is fragmentary. First, the whole of Glissant’s work, written with the greatest precision and detail, should be commented on word by word: but this would take an entire lifetime, which I no longer have. Second, I discuss only Glissant’s essays and his theory. A topography of the gigantic monument comprised by his œuvre in its entirety would have needed to include his poetry, dramas, and novels. Similarly, his specific relation to the Caribbean, especially to Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, would have required examination: the absence of these two key reference points is enough to indicate the partial nature of my project. An exhaustive account of the work would require a reading of its literary and poetic side (in fact, these themes have already been explored by the critics).2 But if we are to speak intelligibly of a rhizome where “everything is in everything,” where the smallest piece is connected to the whole, we need to distinguish, to fragment, to break, to truncate, so as not to fall into an amorphous mess.

I have therefore limited the field of my study to Glissant’s intimate relationship with the “Western” philosophical tradition that pervades and informs his work. This relationship is both conflicted and welcoming—and, so far, this area of research has, with few exceptions, been neglected by critics.

My title might seem misleading. Édouard Glissant as Thinker might have been more apt, if we follow Jean-Claude Milner’s definition of thought as “something whose existence is imposed on those who have not thought of it,”3 which is an apt description of the effect produced by Glissant’s work. Or else, Glissant as “Rethinker,” since he reassesses the themes of the philosophical tradition. Alexandre Kojève’s definition of philosophical discourse also suits him perfectly: “It is a discourse, not just any discourse, but one that is different from all others insofar as it speaks not only of that whereof it speaks but also of the fact that it speaks about it in a way that other discourses do not.”4 Indeed, no word, no phrase in Glissant is ventured at random; very few discourses have such an awareness of their own nature.

In the antithesis that opens Poétique de la Relation, two categories of thought are contrasted: abstraction and concreteness. The latter is always given priority, breaking with the “Western” philosophical tradition, which usually tends toward abstraction. For Glissant, thinking is a matter of becoming entangled in a realm far from abstraction, individualization, and solitude, located amid the realities of the world, in the sharing of a community, even if this community is still to come. Thought as an act transforming the past and opening up the future differs from the philosophy faithful to the tradition inaugurated by Socrates. Thinking is a shared gesture in the real world, not in the solitude of ideas:

Thinking about thought often comes down to withdrawing into a dimensionless place where the idea of thought alone persists. But thought is really spaced out in the world. It informs the imaginary of peoples, their diversified poetics, which in turn it transforms—and in which its risk is realized.

Culture is the pretension of those who claim to think thought but stand aside from its chaotic journey. Evolving cultures infer Relation, the transcendence that underpins their unity-diversity.

Thought draws the imaginary of the past: a knowledge in the making. We cannot halt it to assess it, nor isolate it to utter it. It is a sharing, and no one can stray from it or, by halting, take advantage of it. (PR 13)

Thought remakes the past and sketches out a knowledge in the making; it is not an affirmation of scholarly mastery, for no one can anticipate becoming; the philosophical tradition usually thinks what is and what has been, not what will be.

That Glissant was a poet, novelist, and playwright is common knowledge; that he thought according to these modes of writing is obvious. More unnoticed is his debate with the Western philosophical tradition as such: here his practice is allusive, metaphorical, and implicit. This is partly to avoid all pedantry, but above all to produce an interbreeding and interweaving that incorporates this tradition into the very material of his own work. This amounts to transforming philosophy into a poetics with its own distinctive tone of voice.

There is in Glissant, when he debates with philosophy or with the world, a patient hastening toward content, toward what he calls the “full-meaning” (“le plein-sens,” PR 168, 217): “The meaning (linear), the full-meaning (in circularity)” (PR 236). His discourse does not obey any formal, required, or obligatory norm, except that which his poetic inspiration gives him. The formal requisites, languages, and rhetorics of philosophy, criticism, and literary history, the constraints to which those whom he calls the “literati” or the “scholars” are subjected, do not impress him because, in his vision of things, they are too often a way of muffling the truth and skewing meaning and reality. Rationalism and structure stifle truth/poetry. If, on a profound level, we think that the poetic is capable of truth, it need not conform to established rules. To restore the poetic to its inaugural place: that is the task.

Following Glissant, then, we need to draw an essential distinction, not only between “common thought” and “scholarly thinking” (EBR 151), but above all between “objective knowledge (savoir),” of whatever kind, historical, philosophical, linguistic, or critical, and “subjective knowledge (connaissance),” a word that echoes Claudel’s Art poétique.5 Subjective knowledge—the meaning of objective knowledge, the meaning of truth: such is the stake of Glissant’s discourse: “Thus the theory of Relation cannot constitute a science, that is to say generalize by drawing up statutes and definitions for distinct roles. Relation is not objectively known, only subjectively knowable” (DA 251). This presupposes that we replace the concept and the abstract system on which it depends with notions founded in intuition, in the imaginary and materiality. So we will see that the operation does not in any way lead to an artistic blur.

Glissant’s imposition of new meanings on the discourses that preceded him often causes misunderstandings, the first being to regard him as a “paraphilosopher” indulging in the gossip of a “poetic” subjectivity. Furthermore, for certain interpreters, the precipitate movement toward meaning is the sign that Glissant’s thought is born out of nowhere, that it is inaugural and has emerged fully armed from a blank canvas. Nothing could be further from the truth: this thought draws on a concrete philosophical anthropology whose sources are often found in the West; it was therefore necessary for me to exhume them, partly according to the rules of academic knowledge, in order to determine Glissant’s originality in relation to any tradition, always keeping in mind that the purpose of interpretation is subjective, not objective knowledge: even a very high level of culture does not guarantee understanding.

To take Glissant’s propositions as so many certainties born out of nothing is both to reduce the questioning they deserve and to diminish their importance. A critical tabula rasa will flatten the historical depth of this thought into an achronic expanse. But we must remember that Glissant was first and foremost a thinker of and in history.

Le Sang rivé, a collection of his first poems written between 1947 and 1961 and published in 1961, includes, by way of exordium, an opening passage in which the writer is already reflecting on his act of poetry by placing himself “outside” the latter:

Poems—throughout the work of poetry, aimed at marking out the surroundings—not the strained, dull, monotonous or flat work in the image of the sea, endlessly sculpted—but splinters, tuned to the effervescence of the earth—and opening within the heart, beyond care and torment, something like a stridency of beaches—always cast away, always taken back, outside any completion—not works of art but the matter itself through which the work makes its way—are, all of them, related to some project that soon rejected them—first cries, naïve rumors, weary forms—witnesses, however inconvenient, of this project—which meet in their imperfection and thus find a perfect sense of solidarity—and here can convince us to tarry with uncertainty—with that which trembles, wavers and ceaselessly becomes all over again—like a land that is ravaged—scattered. (SC 9)

This exordium makes the anthology a composite object, somewhere between a collection of poems and a reflection on their production. It relegates the poems to obsolescence in the name of a new project that led to Soleil de la conscience (published in 1956). In addition, the exordium of Le Sang rivé is the announcement of a gap between the poet’s aims and intentions and their inadequate materialization, something that in 1969 was to form the major theme of L’Intention poétique. But, immediately, this lack becomes the very sign of a future full of optimism: the failure is pregnant with a poetic future in the making, of a “matter,” a “path,” a “trembling” opening out on an uncertain tomorrow. Soleil de la conscience and L’Intention poétique amplify this interbreeding and interweaving of discursive types, mingling together poetry and reflection. Right from the start, Le Sang rivé establishes Glissant’s specific mode of poetic production, which consists in going back over his past writings—what could be called a “becoming again,” a self-critical mulling over his past that relaunches his project each time by modulating it.

With regard to the critical or conceptual title we file his work under, Glissant is, strictly speaking, unclassifiable; he has produced a work that lies beyond Belles-Lettres, the Republic of Letters, literature, and philosophy. At the very least, his project goes beyond the traditional notion of what is conceived as “literature.” In 1958, La Lézarde still obeyed the conventions allowing it to be classified in the genre of the novel, but Glissant increasingly practiced a form of radically mixed writing, mingling genres so that the books he produced became uncategorizable. In fact, his œuvre, with a cross-generic aspect almost unprecedented in the tradition, appeals to new readers:

Relation is unpredictable, and does not conceive of any rhetoric. […] The Chaos-World is unpredictable, and creates many rhetorics. Also, a system can be conceived in such a context only if it includes all possible rhetorics and also all the possibilities of a non-universalizing trans-rhetoric. (TTM 114)

There is thus no need to parrot Glissant in an adulatory and repetitive way, but to understand him and to consider him critically. If Glissant’s reservations about systems and reason (as opposed to the imaginary) are to be valid, they must be completely rethought; they must not be simply restated in a mimetic reading. It is not enough for the interpretation to “quote” a critique (of the West, of identity, of Being, of universality, etc.) to become critical in its turn; the interpretation must reassess this critique’s significance, trace its archeology, and ensure that assessment becomes an organic part of the knowledge being conveyed.

Academic knowledge may not give us an adequate grasp of Glissant’s work, despite the very rich insights that this discourse has already produced: forever turned to a past that it inventories, this knowledge can admittedly produce indispensable insights. But how can it proceed to embrace a dynamic thought, endlessly becoming and intent on emerging from the library so as to embrace the world? How can it proceed with an object that is not literary knowledge (or objective know-how), but subjective knowledge, notions that Glissant always distinguishes between?

Glissant has no intention of constructing a literary work. In this sense, literary theory and criticism are of little use to those who wish to read and express the world, its cultures and its objects. Glissant’s thought is in no way a reflection on the singular status of literary fiction,6 on the role of the simulacra that literature shapes into an infinite parade (see his remarks in EBR 83–84); literary techniques, of which he makes so great and so subtle a use, are not objects of thought for him (see what he says of artistic techniques in Une nouvelle région du monde). In this sense, a purely “literary” analysis of the work will always fail to capture it, regardless of the richness of its insights.

Except for Le Discours antillais, the entire work could be read as a critique of academic discourse, with its many rigid distinctions and specializations, with its separation between subject and object, self and others, author and work, form and substance, with its ghettoization of national literatures and languages and literary genres, its contrast between philosophy and poetry, its cacophonies of methods and theories, its prioritizing of concept over experience, and its ideological contrast between the West and its Others. Glissant’s thought rejects these segregations. Everything must be integrated into the uniqueness of the poetic dimension; the work must create the subject as much as the subject writes it, and thus follow Montaigne who, in his Essais, writes: “I have not made my book any more than my book has made me, a book consubstantial with its author, with a proper occupation, a limb of my life; not with an occupation and end that is a third party, foreign like all other books.”7

Le Discours antillais has a special status in the problematics of Glissant’s various discourses. In its first form, it was presented in 1980 to an academic jury at the University of Paris-VIII in order to obtain the symbolic recognition of a specific degree, namely a doctorate granted on the basis of published works. Le Discours antillais marks Glissant’s entry into academic discourse; it is therefore not surprising that it is quite different from the rest of his writi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Translator’s Note
• Chapter 1 “The immense foliage of a Louisiana oak, like a flattened palaver tree”
• Chapter 2 “Repetition is not an unnecessary duplication”
• Chapter 3 “I do not reject, I establish correlation”
• Chapter 4 “This need to go beyond one’s own subjectivity”
• Chapter 5 “Everything is in everything”
• Chapter 6 “Universality has no language”
• Chapter 7 “Bounds, breaks and sudden leaps”
• Chapter 8 “Only the poets”
• Chapter 9 “The beauty of beauty”
• Chapter 10 “The dispute, one of the safest and oldest reinforcements of thought”
• Chapter 11 “We do not name Relation”
• Chapter 12 “Now there are only beings”
• Chapter 13 “The slave is the one who does not know, but who desires with all his strength to know”
• Chapter 14 “I change things, through exchanging with the other, and yet without destroying or distorting myself”
• Chapter 15 “And so we bring down (as if literally) the letter of the world”
• Chapter 16 “Imagine a thousand birds taking flight over an African lake”
• Chapter 17 “The continuity of the living is a spiral that does not fear to be interrupted”
• Chapter 18 “Yes, yes, everything is alive”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover