Poetics of Relation

by Édouard Glissant, Betsy Wing (translator)

Édouard Glissant, long recognized in the French and francophone world as one of the greatest writers and thinkers of our times, is increasingly attracting attention from English-speaking readers. Born in Martinique in 1928, Glissant earned a doctorate from the Sorbonne. When he returned to his native land in the mid-sixties, his writing began to focus on the idea of a "relational poetics," which laid the groundwork for the "créolité" movement, fueled by the understanding that Caribbean culture and identity are the positive products of a complex and multiple set of local historical circumstances. Some of the metaphors of local identity Glissant favored--the hinterland (or lack of it), the maroon (or runaway slave), the creole language--proved lasting and influential.
In Poetics of Relation, Glissant turns the concrete particulars of Caribbean reality into a complex, energetic vision of a world in transformation. He sees the Antilles as enduring suffering imposed by history, yet as a place whose unique interactions will one day produce an emerging global consensus. Arguing that the writer alone can tap the unconscious of a people and apprehend its multiform culture to provide forms of memory capable of transcending "nonhistory," Glissant defines his "poetics of relation"--both aesthetic and political--as a transformative mode of history, capable of enunciating and making concrete a French-Caribbean reality with a self-defined past and future. Glissant's notions of identity as constructed in relation and not in isolation are germane not only to discussions of Caribbean creolization but also to our understanding of U.S. multiculturalism. In Glissant's view, we come to see that relation in all its senses--telling, listening, connecting, and the parallel consciousness of self and surroundings--is the key to transforming mentalities and reshaping societies.
This translation of Glissant's work preserves the resonating quality of his prose and makes the richness and ambiguities of his voice accessible to readers in English.
"The most important theoretician from the Caribbean writing today. . . . He is central not only to the burgeoning field of Caribbean studies, but also to the newly flourishing literary scene in the French West Indies." --Judith Graves Miller, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Édouard Glissant is Distinguished Professor of French at City University of New York, Graduate Center. Betsy Wing's recent translations include Lucie Aubrac's Outwitting the Gestapo (with Konrad Bieber), Didier Eribon's Michel Foucault and Hélêne Cixous's The Book of Promethea.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Poetry, Race, Research, Essays

224 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 1997

About the author

Édouard Glissant was a French writer, poet, philosopher, and literary critic from Martinique. He is widely recognised as one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought and cultural commentary.

Reviews

[Puck · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading and learning a lot about colonialism this year, and I feel this book provides the framework to tie everything together. It is a powerful critique of the mindset that governs western thought. Using the history of slaves taken to the Caribbean (who lost everything they knew and were thrown into a completely different world) as a starting point, Glissant explores a new epistemology that is centered on Relation.

Some of the concepts explored are errantry (as opposed to linear striving) opacity as an understanding that the Other cannot be fully known (as opposed to transparency, that thinks everything can be fully known, studied, and controlled), giving-on-and-with which is a reciprocal exchange of knowledge and experiences (as opposed to grasping, which implies control and possession), and the world seen as totalite-monde, echos-monde, and chaos-monde.

Glissant is a gifted writer that weaves theoretical and poetical styles. You might not understand everything here, but the text is filled with depth and evokes many ideas and emotions. Poetry is essential to Glissant as a way of knowing, and it becomes evident he is right when reading this. The translation by Betsy Wing is also really good. Her notes on Glissant's concepts allowed me to understand what he meant way more precisely.

The ideas of the book are really powerful. As an avid traveler and couch-surfer, as someone curious and very appreciative about the diversity of humanity and the world, and as someone that despises how harmful injustice to others is, Poetics of Relation gives me a way of embracing, celebrating, and protecting the beauty of the world. It encourages me to not assume anything about anybody, put aside labels of identity politics to truly connect with others, to strive to understand as much as I can, for the joy of it, even though it is ultimately impossible to fully understand.

https://blogelarca.com/poetica-de-la-...

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful methodology which breaks down constructs of worldview and, in essence, helps us stop playing God and to get on with embracing others, being oneself an "other". An excerpt from a research paper I wrote on this methodology:

Edouard Glissant, in his text Poetics of Relation, finds it impossible and limiting to attempt to grasp the world, or all its peoples, in any type of system, or to simply assimilate all working classes into one universal, political melting pot of humanity (Glissant 135). He uses a term, 'Chaos-monde', which at its essence considers the world in fluidity and suggests that we must embrace, but not group together, all the elements and forms of expression within the totality (Glissant 95). Thus the only totality we can consider for our world is one of chaos, not in a meaningless, nihilistic way, but in a way that will always escape our full understanding and categorizing.
Edouard Glissant offers not a universal, idealized view of language and identity, but a heterogenous process of uprooting the cultural artifacts of consciousness we carry, by allowing them to be informed and transformed by others. Glissant calls this the process of creolization, using the Colonial example of the French language being intermingled and changed within local Caribbean dialects (Glissant 5). French is not the dominant language used to subvert populations (though it was thought to be by the colonizers), nor is it ignored by the colonized. Rather, through the relations between peoples, the process mixes these languages and creates something new, unique and localized to the situation. This process, rhizomatic in its movements, is interdependent on the relations between people, bridging the abyss of difference that separates humans. It is the relation that permeates and works in ourselves, for “sometimes, by taking up the problems of the Other, it is possible to find oneself” (Glissant 18).

[huai]

one way ashore, a thousand channels

this work understands poetics as the transformative mode of history, and offers Relation as this mode - arising out of understandings of abyss, errantry, archipelago, rhizome, computer, baroque, beach paths. this just feels like how we will move forward, the generosity and grace gifted by Afro-Caribbean poet to “honor our boats…

despite seeing the political leap that must be managed, the horror of hunger and ignorance, torture and massacre to be conquered, the full load of knowledge to be tamed, the weight of every piece of machinery that we shall finally control, and the exhausting flashes as we pass from one era to another-from forest to city, from story to computer-at the bow there is still something we now share: this murmur, cloud or rain or peaceful smoke. We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.”

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant tells a story of a culture, but takes it to a wider place, a way perhaps of understanding the world in a more gentle, dynamic and, I think, relaxed way. I was really struck by the image of the beach, where seasonally dark sands and choppy waters are replaced by the pale whites and blue skies of the brochure. By this he means, embrace the chaos of the encounter, the interweaving and marrying of culture and people and the vast legacy of galaxies of little lives. A rejection of the Western, colonial desire to classify and control, an assertion of opacity. What a beautiful thought. The tides go in and out, crashing waves, toppled coconuts, ashes drawn up from volcanic depths. This is not to take romance in nature and he articulates the reality of that so well; the frozen andes, the arid, dusty desert, the monsoon rain. It can be harsh. People must live in relation. I also love that he so clearly loves his Island's sand, seas and skies.

His description of the slave ships, charting their course to the plantations of the Caribbean is so moving. Cargo thrown overboard, underwater signposts mark the way between the Gold Coast and the Leeward Islands, one vast beginning punctured by balls and chains going green. I think this brings it to life, anyone who has spent any time at a beach has seen the rust, the lovely, salty, rotting smell of lapping water and purple seaweed. Chains and oxidant processes we've all seen suddenly have a new meaning. The story teller around the fire, children beside themselves, wide eyed, feverish shivering in front of flickering flames, his voice comes from across the water. Africa is the hidden comrade. This is an argument which I feel shows hope, there's poetics and resistance and love of the people around and the stars and the ancestors and the beauty of the waves.

'We have stood bent against the wind without falling. One lone bay; whatever name it had evaporated. Also endeavouring to point out this blue tinge to everything. Its sun strolls by, in the savanna's silver shuddering and the ocre smell of the hounded earth.'

I do want to add that I would love someone smarter than me to read this book and explain it to me, because I felt every word, but I don't think I quite understood a lot of the things he was saying. :) Although that's partly his fault because he writes so beautifully you find yourself swept up in it.

[Jee Koh · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I missed in my education as a poet: Édouard Glissant. About the entry of a dominant culture into a fragile and composite one, such as French culture into Martinique or Anglo-American into Singapore:

"Consequently, wouldn't it be best just to go along with it? Wouldn't it be a viable solution to embellish the alienation, to endure while comfortably receiving state assistance, with all the obvious guarantees implied in such a decision? This is what the technocratic elite, created for the management of decoy positions, have to talk themselves into before they convince the people of Martinique. Their task is all the less difficult since they use it to give themselves airs of conciliation, of cooperative humanism, of a realism anxious to make concrete improvements in circumstances. Not counting the pleasures of permissive consumption. Not counting the actual advantages of a special position, in which public funds (from France or Europe) serve to satisfy a rather large number of people (to the benefit, however, of French or European companies that are more and more visible in the country or castes of bekes converted from former planters into a tertiary sector and thus won over to the ideas of this elite) and serve to foster the hopes of an even greater number.

"And it is true that in a contest of this sort one spares oneself both the sacred violence, which is spreading with such lightning speed over half the planet. What remains here is only the suppressed and intermittent violence of a community convulsively demonstrating its sense of disquiet. What sense of disquiet? The one that comes from having to consume the world without participating in it, without even the least idea of it, without being able to offer it anything other than a vague homily to a generalizing universal. Privileged disquiet....

"Thus, within the pitiless panorama of the worldwide commercial market, we debate our problems. No matter where you are or what the government brings you together into a community, the forces of this market are going to find you. If there is profit to be made, they will deal with you. These are not vague forces that you might accommodate out of politeness; these are hidden forces of inexorable logic that must be answered with the total logic of your behavior. For example, one could not accept state assistance and at the same time pretend to oppose it. You must choose your bearing. And, to get back to the question raised earlier, simply consenting would not be worth it, in any case. Contradiction would knot the community (which ceases to be one) with impossibilities, profoundly destabilizing it. The entire country would become a Plantation, believing it operates with freedom of decision but, in fact, being outer directed. The exchange of goods... is the rule. Bustling commerce only confirms the fragmentation and opposition to change. Minds get used up in this superficial comfort, which has cost them an unconscious, enervating braining....

"Now let us try to summarize the things we don't yet know, the things we have no current means of knowing, concerning all the singularities, all the trajectories, all the histories, all the forms of denaturaton, and all the syntheses that are at work or that have resulted from our confluences. How have cultures—Chinese or Basque, Indian or Inuit, Polynesian or Alpine—made their way to us, and how have we reached them? What remains to us of all the vanished cultures, collapsed or exterminated, and in what form? What is our experience, even now, of the pressures of dominant cultures? Through what fantastic accumulations of how many existences, both individual and collective? Let us try to calculate the result of all that. We will be incapable of doing so. Our experience of this confluence will forever be only one part of its totality.

"No matter how many studies and references we accumulate (thought it is our profession to carry out such things), we will never reach the end of such a volume; knowing this in advance makes it possible for us to dwell there. Not knowing this totality is not a weakness. Not wanting to know it certainly is. Consequently, we imagine it through a poetics: this imaginary realm provides the full-sense of all these always decisive differentiations. [my emphasis] A lack of this poetics, its absence or its negations, would constitute a failing.

"Similarly, thought of the Other is sterile without the other of Thought.

"Thought of the Other is the moral generosity disposing me to accept the principle of alterity, to conceive of the world as not simple and straightforward, with only one truth—mine. But thought of the Other can dwell within me without making me alter course, without "prizing me open," without changing me within myself. An ethical principle, it is enough that I not violate it.

"The other of Thought is precisely this altering. Then I have to act. That is the moment I change my thought, without renouncing its contribution. I change, and I exchange. This is an aesthetics of turbulence, whose corresponding ethics is not provided in advance.

"If, thus, we allow that an aesthetics is an art of conceiving, imagining, and acting, the other of Thought is the aesthetics implemented by me and by you to join the dynamics to which we are to contribute. This is the part fallen to me in an aesthetics of chaos, the work I am to undertake, the road I am to travel. Thought of the Other is occasionally presupposed by dominant populations, but with an utterly sovereign power, or proposed until it hurts by those under them, who set themselves free. The other of Thought is always set in motion by its confluences as a whole, in which each is changed by and changes the other."

[Scott Neigh]

A classic work (originally published in 1990) theorizing aesthetics and politics starting from the ways in which the experiences of people in the Caribbean have historically been organized. By a renowned intellectual and poet from Martinique. Translated from French (and not just any French, but a French infused with Creole and torqued through linguistic innovation and play that is central to the theoretical work being done).

Gonna be honest here, I do not bring enough to this book to get out of it even close to all the richness it contains. But I think I got some of the basics. He doesn't use this language, exactly, but the book is about different logics that organize different cultures, different ways of moving through the world, and the world itself. Classic Western culture of the last five centuries is characterized by an impulse to projection into the world via linear movement, to assertion of legitimacy via connection to some mythical root, to linear notions of time, to knowing the world through a particular kind of rationalism that subsumes particularities under generalities and enables power-over, to relating to difference as expressive of static essences – to, in short, all of the ways of being wound through colonial and other forms of domination. That is not the only logic out there in the world, of course – he also mentions, for example, the circular temporalities of Buddhist cultures, and others beside. But his main focus beyond the Western cultural logic is what he describes as Relation, a cultural logic that has emerged from cracks in the world that the Western logic has produced, particularly in the Caribbean and other places where domination was organized through the social form of the plantation. Relation, it seems to me, is both a description of how the world is in practice increasingly organized – the classical world of the 18th century West is no more, regardless of the violent nostalgia of white nationalists – but also as something to aspire to, something that some embrace while other do not and that all of us should, and still a context in which great harm can be done by those with a will to dominate. It is a world of complexity, of networks of difference in which particularities understand themselves through their inevitable relationships with other particularities but are never forced to become other than they are through generalization. Its associated logic of movement is not linear projection with the intent to dominate (nor the exile such domination can impose on others, nor the circular nomadism of certain other cultures) but what he describes as "errantry," a kind of non-linear but deliberate movement through the world via which connection is cultivated. All of this is explored in a lot of different ways, not all of which I completely understood.

I read this because there is one particular idea that Glissant uses that I think might be useful to me, and I wanted to make sure I understand it well enough to know for sure and to use it respectfully. Another feature of classical Western cultural logics is a drive towards what he calls transparency – to relating to everything as if it can be completely known, including other people and peoples. This is connected to the colonial tendency to generate knowledge about the colonized in ways that render them knowable and therefore controllable objects. In contrast, Relation is premised on respecting the reality of opacity – that we cannot ever know everything that there is to know about other people, other cultures. Moreover, accepting opacity means accepting the personhood and agency of those who are different, rather than indulging in the violent pretense of knowing enough to know better (in the ways the colonizer always claims to know better). Mutual opacity, and respect for mutual opacity, is foundational to the kinds of nonhierarchical relations across difference that are emerging as Relation emerges, and certainly part of what the aspiartion for Relation points towards. Opacity is both a feature of the world, because we really *can't* know everything about other people and it is only the violent generalization of Western cultural logics that allows us to pretend that we do. But it is also something that we must fight for – "We clamor for the right to opacity for everyone" (194).

Anyway...any work like this inevitably has strengths and weaknesses, but there's lots about it that I just don't feel capable of evaluating. But it is, overall, fascinating and brilliant, if sometimes quite hard work.

[Jenina · Rating 5 out of 5]

October 11, 2021
"On the other side of the bitter struggles against domination and for the liberation of the imagination, there opens up a multiply dispersed zone in which we are gripped by vertigo. But this is not the vertigo preceding an apocalypse and Babel's fall. It is the shiver of a beginning, confronted with extreme possibility. It is possible to build the Tower — in every language."

This 'shiver of a beginning' resonated acutely in my daily life throughout reading 'Poetics of Relation.' I felt so aware of being entangled outside of the singular root that wired me to be on autopilot. I was also 'gripped by vertigo' where the precarity of life crystallized, rendering me to feel that our lives, identities, and knowledges were all entangled across time and space...so of course my first reaction to this awareness was uGH yiKES, and to compartmentalize! Instead of letting the intensity flow (as it should), I over-intellectualized, which is part of the reason why this review is so overdue. I hesitated to step into what it meant to lean onto 'chaos-monde', or considering the world in its totality and autopilot-ed to the learned Western default of controlling, taking possession, and categorizing the world's complexity under reductive transparency.

Glissant famously clamors for opacity, calling for the West and Westernized frameworks to absolve its voracious appetite to 'discover', 'know', and 'understand' those it deems as the 'Other' to deploy and coerce the dominant Western ways of knowing and being. To clamor for opacity for the Other means that we are not compelled to shrink ourselves and make our identities legible. It is in the assemblage of our differences that allows for new imaginaries and world-building to emerge and be made concrete. Our ways of knowing and our entanglements with one another don't fit into these convenient storylines or prescribed timelines, rather, they are always contested and fragmented. Even the question of location is a 'productive confusion' for Glissant. We are always navigating material and immaterial boundaries because of the imposed colonial and imperialist structures, systems, and hierarchies.

I wished I read Glissant in high school, the apogee of navigating the murkiness in forming my political awareness outside of the Western epistemes. In these high school classes, I had instructors that could not understand why I cared so much about post-colonial, decolonial, or anti-colonial ways of knowing in juxtaposition (or in contestation) with the historical revisionism and white-washing embedded in our history textbooks. As a consequence of the clear myopic dominant narrative presented and institutionalized, I feel a sense of homecoming reading Glissant. He is one of the few authors I like thinking alongside with (the others are bell hooks, John Berger, Jamaica Kincaid, Rachel Cusk, Julio Cortazar, Jorge Luis Borges, Audre Lorde, and Clarice Lispector). The idea of 'relations' weaves together the questions of poetics, aesthetics, and politics — connected through the enmeshed root system that forms our identity in relation to one another, rather than singular, universalizing, and extractive root.

Reading 'Poetics of Relation' was an exercise of tenderness that does not grasp or hold something tightly against false sense of urgencies and mindless flaneur-like wanderings. I am learning a tenderness that allows itself to take an amorphous form through a reciprocal and sacred exchange in relation to one another. A tenderness that permits itself to actively participate in the weaving of a spiraling web, even if it does not know what kind of world/imaginary it is building, or who will inhabit it.

Ending with a passage from the chapter, 'The Black Beach':
"All the languages of the world had come to die here in the quiet, tortured rejection of what was going on all around him in this country: another constant downward drift yet one performed with anxious satisfaction; the obtrusive sounds of an excitement that is not sure of itself, the pursuit of a happiness that is limited to shaky privileges; the imperceptible numbing effect of quarrels taken to represent a major battle. All this he rejected, casting us out to the edges of his silence. "

This is a book that can't be reduced to a few quotes, so PLS READ THE WHOLE THING!!!

----
September 14, 2021
Ruminating on my thoughts and compiling my notes from the margins.

In the meantime, a highlight from the last page:
“Going to acknowledge myself in the unclear and so particular effervescence, of another sort, one with no accumulation of forgetting, and unending because always changing.”

[David Gaitán · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una muy sugerente y poética mirada a lo decolonial que pone el acento en las tácticas de resistencia llevadas a cabo por las personas subalternas.

Se pone de relieve la capacidad política para el presente de la ficción como dispositivo imaginativo.
Consigue armar un pensamiento rizomático, proclive a la metaforización de los procesos coloniales vividos en las plantaciones de EEUU y más allá.

Como ciudadano de Martinica, estira las posibilidades identitarias más allá del hibridismo cultural, incidiendo en el giro ético que subyace al pensar histórico si no solo se pretende comprender el mundo. Esto es, desplegar una mirada de convivencia con aquello que no se entiende y estirando la memoria del pasado a aquello olvidado, aquello que quizas nunca pasó pero que se pensó o se sintió.

[Elisefur · Rating 5 out of 5]

“As far as my identity is concerned, I will take care of it myself. That is, I shall not allow it to become cornered in any essence; I shall also pay attention to not mixing it into any amalgam. Rather, it does not disturb me to accept that there are places where my identity is obscure to me, and the fact that it amazes me does not mean I relinquish it.”

“we clamor for the right to opacity for everyone. “

a dazzling (if opaque) theoretical work on decolonisation, which is still and much needed.

[Aeven · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this even though I was totally confused.

[Sophie Small · Rating 3 out of 5]

As far as philosophy about Caribbean Art History goes, this was fairly interesting. Maybe just not my topic.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

noies a llegir-lo

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

“If we examine the process of "understanding" people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce.”

[el · Rating 4 out of 5]

- How to establish Relation not based on generalizability and transparency of the Other, but upon difference and opacity (unity-diversity)

- The stretch of the Plantation; Plantation geographies

"People who have been to the abyss do not brag of being chosen. They do not believe they are giving birth to any modern force. They live Relation and clear the way for it..." (8)

"The theory of the poem is resistant to expression." (30)

"The imagined transparency of Relation is, in that way, the opposite of reductive transparency of the generalizing universal." (55)

"For centuries 'generalization,' as operated by the West, brought different community tempos into an equivalency in which it attempted to give a hierarchical order to the times they flowered. Now that the panorama has been determined and equidistances described, is it not, perhaps, time to return to a no less necessary 'degeneralization'? Not to a replenished outrageous excess of specificities but to a total (dreamed-of) freedom of the connections among them cleared out of the very chaos of their confrontations." (62)

"The Plantations, entities turned in upon themselves, paradoxically have all the symptoms of extroversion. They are dependent, by nature, on someplace elsewhere. In their practice of importing and exporting, the established politics is not decided from within. One could say, in fact, that, socially, the Plantation is not the product of a politics but the emanation of a fantasy." (67)

"This is the only sort of universality there is: when, from a specific enclosure, the deepest voice cries out." (74)

"It doesn't feel right to have to represent someone so rigorously adrift, so I won't try to describe him. What I would like to show is the nature of this speechlessness. All the languages of the world had come to die here in the quiet, tortured rejection of what was going on all around him in this country...I made an attempt to communicate with this absence. I respected his stubborn silence, but (frustrated by my inability to make myself 'understood' or accepted) wanted nonetheless to establish some system of relation with this walker that was not based on words." (122)

"I thought that how everywhere, and in how many different modes, it is the same necessity to fit into the chaotic drive of totality that is at work, despite being subjected to the exaltations or numbing effects of specific existences." (124)

"This is why we cannot put a hierarchical order to the different 'times' pressing into this global space. It is not certain that the time of History leads to confluences any faster or more certainly than the diffracted times in which the histories of populations are scattered and call out to one another. Within this problematic, beyond decisions made by power and domination, nobody knows how cultures are going to react in relation to one another nor which of their elements will be the dominant ones, or thought of as such. In this full sense all cultures are equal within Relation." (163)'

"Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity." (190)

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two lines from Poetics of Relation:


*


We are not prompted solely by the defining of our identities but by their relation to everything possible as well – the mutual mutations generated by this interplay of relations.


*


Understood in its full-sense, passion for the land where one lives is a start, an action we must endlessly risk.


*

[Michael Y. · Rating 3 out of 5]

6.5/10

there are some gorgeous deeply insightful lines coming out of this book that i truly feel have affected some of the ways i look at binaries, societies, language, and beings (opacities!)

i appreciate the notion of changing language for a changing structure, but i feel like there were so many instances where crafting his own language structure obscured a lot of meaning / although that was explicitly mentioned as opacity differences .

[Arif K. · Rating 4 out of 5]

8.9

i'm pretty sure, i "gave-on-and-with" at least 50% valuable substance out of this book. however, when the author introduced heidegger's philosophy of being in the axiom, it started messing up with my head. nevertheless, it's a great book, probably the most articulate theory text out there.

[Solaris · Rating 5 out of 5]

You should absolutely not miss this book if you're into Identity Studies or Postcolonialism. Extremely short version: it's a very powerful and insightful read.

[Carlos Valladares · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A language that does not risk the disturbances arising from contact among cultures, and not ardently involved in the reflections generated by an equal relation with other languages, seems to me doomed to real impoverishment. [...] It would be more beautiful to live in a symphony of languages than in some reduced universal monolinguism—neutered and standardized. There is one thing we can be sure of: a lingua franca (humanistic French, Anglo-American sabir, or Esperanto code) is always apoetical."

"In the course of this journey, Identity—at least as far as the Western peoples who made up the great majority of voyagers, discoverers, and conquerors were concerned—consolidates itself implicitly at first ("my root is the strongest") and then is explicitly exported as a value ("a person's worth is determined by his root"). The conquered or visited peoples are thus forced into a long and painful quest after an identity whose first task will be opposition to the denaturing process introduced by the conqueror. A tragic variation of a search for identity. For more than two centuries whole populations have had to assert their identity in opposition to the processes of identification or annihilation triggered by these invaders. Whereas the Western nation is first of all an "opposite," for colonized peoples identity will be primarily "opposed to"—that is, a limitation from the beginning. Decolonization will have done its real work when it goes beyond this limit."

"In this context uprooting can work toward identity, and exile can be seen as beneficial, when these are experienced as a search for the Other (through circular nomadism) rather than as an expansion of territory (an arrowlike nomadism). Totality's imaginary allows the detours that lead away from anything totalitarian."

"In the poetics of Relation, one who is errant (who is no longer traveler, discoverer, or conqueror) strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he will never accomplish this—and knows that is precisely where the threatened beauty of the world resides. Errant, he challenges and discards the universal."

[Shirry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poetics of Relation is a bold, visionary work that seeks to reconceptualize identity, culture, and language through the lens of relation, creolization, and the poetics of interconnectedness. However, it is also marked by a number of philosophical, cultural, and theological inconsistencies that deserve scrutiny.
Concept of “errantry”, particularly monolingual or non-migratory societies. This implicit suggestion that such societies are less dynamic or less involved in the evolution of world history reveals a narrow and uneven application of his otherwise fluid relational philosophy.
This issue is amplified in his discussion of non-Western languages, including Quechua, Swahili, Hindi, and Chinese - where he describes them as “endogenous and non-proliferating,” it dismisses the world-making poetics of culture outside the Atlantic paradigm and ironically reproduces a Eurocentric measure of visibility and relevance- precisely what Glissant claims to resist.
Glissant’s uses of Einstein’s theory of relativity feels overstretched. It falls into a kind of cosmological vagueness.
Perhaps most revealing of Glissant’s blind spots is his framing of Eastern and Western mythologies. He suggests that Buddhist and other Asian narratives centre on “self-perfection through dissolution into the All,” while Western mythologies focus on the individual in relation to the community. This binary is not only reductive, it inverts commonly held critiques of Western individualism and Eastern communalism, flattening both traditions into caricature.
I find myself distracted by these inconsistencies, which undermine the coherence of Glissant’s argument. These errors diminish the credibility of a work that otherwise aims to offer a radical and inclusive vision of global relation.

[Ted Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you’re interested at all in how to construct a “deracialized” (a la Tran) world, you have to interact with Glissant. Glissant understands us all to be wanderers - some of us wander to travel, others to discover, others because of exile, and still others to conquer. Glissant argues instead for “errantry” - a wandering that doesn’t seek to possess, dominate, or even understand, but rather to “Creolize” through Relation.

In other words, heeding the warning of James Baldwin, we do not seek to trade the “totalitarian drive of a single, unique root” for another root (i.e., trading one form of supremacy for another), we seek Relation…. we form around a “fundamental relationship with the Other.” In encountering the “Other” our poetic imagination and understanding is “superactivated.” And thus, a new “network” is created - a rhizome - where all people contribute and create in a “consensual, not imposed” sharing. This is aesthetics in a heightened, activated and concrete way - a poetics that goes beyond science and technology and “futureology.” The future is, rather, Relation, as Glissant describes: contacts among cultures, constantly circulating, and extending. We “give-on-and-with” rather than “grasp.”

Imagine a future where those scattered because of Babel come together again beautifully in “coalitional solidarity,” to use Tran’s language. You can see how we don’t have far to connect this with Kingdom.

I know, I know - super technical. Glissant is v. dense. And I probably don’t really understand him all that well. But I’m always incredibly encouraged by those doing constructive work. It’s much easier to critique.

“….we wander without becoming lost.”

“Sometimes, by taking up the problems of the Other, it is possible to find oneself.”

[Hollis]

One of those philosophical books where I get the distinct impression the author is strongly supplementing their vaguely grounded claims with fever dreamish logic that I end up just going along with because--despite whatever frustration is provoked from the circularity of statements and refusal to define concepts--the style of writing is rewarding in a way. Basically, a book I enjoy more as a piece of creative writing than as scholarship. Of course, one could say that about a lot of theory.

Glissant's interlocutors here are variously intriguing and confusing. Why Wittgenstein and not, say, Sylvia Wynter (whose writing on the [literary] plot and plantation precede and clearly support the insights of one chapter, "Closed Place, Open World"), Hortense Spillers (whose writing on hierarchies of language and rhetorics of deviance could fit in just about anywhere here [especially for "The Open Boat"]), or Audre Lorde (the chapter "For Opacity" doesn't open new ground on the topic of difference beyond what she's already said, though I would have been curious to see Glissant expand rather than, well, regurgitating)? Why Saint-John Perse and Faulkner but not Wright/Elision (I could actually be forgetting nods to these authors) or Walcott?

Despite some issues with Glissant's circular style (Relation is never really defined--one could say it resists definition), this is a book I'll probably be wrestling with for some time. Already, I have a deep appreciation for the opening segment, "The Open Boat," where Glissant frames the transatlantic slave vessel as a womb of unmaking for enslaved Africans. I also (relatively) like the book's structure, more or less issued as a sequence of vignettes floating various suggestions about how Relation could be studied (studying relation is [evidently] necessarily engaging in relation--I'm getting flashbacks, not in a good way, to The Undercommons). Glissant's writing is especially rewarding on the subject of subjugated languages and the nature of creolized discourse. Elsewhere, he gets deep into the weeds with casual and-yet-somehow obtusely rendered observations (looking at "The Black Beach" as a main offender), though I acknowledge that this is a translation for a text that, in its very aim, likely resists (direct) translation.

[Ocean Chamberlain · Rating 4 out of 5]

“This is why we stay with poetry. And despite our consenting to aIl the indisputable technologies; despite seeing the political leap that must be managed, the horror of hunger and ignorance, torture and massacre to be conquered, the fullioad of knowledge to be tamed, the weight of every piece of machin- ery that we shaH finally control, and the exhausting flashes as we pass from one era to another-from forest to city, from story to computer-at the bow there is still sornething we now share: this murmur, cloud or rain or peaceful srnoke. We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.” (9)

A book that changed my life!

[Noam Levinsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

While this book was not meant to be grasped, it was certainly difficult to give-on-and-with. I believe that was an intentional part of Glissant's poetics. The opaqueness of this book, the words affected in translation, and the shifting/shifted concept of relation all add to the reader's experience. Like many great books, Glissant's work does not leave one with a transparent call to action. Rather, to read or contemplate it is to immerse one's self in relation. Overall, a challenging and pleasant reading experience. I can't quite articulate what I exchanged with the book. I think that miught be the point.

[Humphrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A difficult book to comprehend, without being a difficult to read, necessarily, per se. In a book written to resist being pinned down, it is inevitable that one would struggle through some chapters; perhaps this is another form of the opacity that the book upholds. I suspect that different chapters speak to different readers; for me, the chapters I found most amenable were "Closed Place, Open World," "Dictate, Decree," and the later chapter "Opacity." The opening chapter, "The Open Boat," is rightly famous.

[Stephanie]

i want to eventually be in a place to completely grasp glissant because he is so prolific and i deeply admire the brilliance of caribbean scholars, specifically in postcolonialism. the writing in “the open boat” in particular is just so incredible. i rarely get emotional when reading academically (more so by experiences of oppression through song) but this got me.

[José · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glissant explains his main concepts: Creolization, Chaos-World, totality, Relation, Poetics of Relation, Myth Rizome and Rhizomatic thought, and thought of the Other and the other of Thought, the last two being only in this book. The rest appear also in Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity, explained more fluently and related to trace thought and wandering.

[Isidora Stanković · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 rounded up because it’s a book with the most poetic sentence construction I’ve read this year. Rhizomes, relation, opacity, what more could you want from a book? I became interestsd in Glissant because it seems all the cool kids of psychoanalysis are reading him, and yes they were right!
Rich book, from talking about an undermined part of history to philosophical takes.

[Emanuel Hritcu · Rating 4 out of 5]

i’m not ready to understand, for now, what is all about this book . i realize that i need to grow, to improve my level of knowledge and understanding; yet, the sensation that leaves is one of a very good and articulate writing

[Taro Hyodo · Rating 3 out of 5]

half the time i didnt get what the fuck he was talking about but that's mostly my fault but also tbh it's mostly his. the first half was solid. i really liked his book poetic intention tho so maybe i just got stupider.