Treatise on the Whole-World

by Édouard Glissant, Celia Britton (Translator)

This exciting, challenging book covers a wide range of subject matter, but all linked together through the key ideas of diversity and ‘Relation’. It sees our modern world, shaped by immigration and the aftermath of colonization, as a multiplicity of different communities interacting and evolving together, and argues passionately against all political and philosophical attempts to impose uniformity, universal or absolute values. This is the ‘Whole-World’, which includes not only these objective phenomena but also our consciousness of them. Our personal identities are not fixed and self-sufficient but formed in ‘Relation’ through our contacts with others. Glissant constantly stresses the unpredictable, ‘chaotic’ nature of the world, which, he claims, we must adapt to and not attempt to limit or control. ‘Creolization’ is not restricted to the Creole societies of the Caribbean but describes all societies in which different cultures with equal status interact to produce new configurations. This perspective produces brilliant new insights into the politicization of culture, but also language, poetry, our relationship to place and to landscapes, globalization, history, and other topics. The book is not written in the style conventionally associated with essays, but is a mixture of argument, proclamation, and poetic evocations of landscapes, lifestyles and people.

Genres: France

158 pages, Paperback

First published January 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

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

il était bien, très bien écrit même
mais justement très compliqué, à relire donc
sinon une richesse de langue que j'ai rarement vu (le dico est utile)

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Gardens in the Sands
'(Theme for the essential dialogue with a poet)

The Gardens: The secret part of the poem, that solitude and grace that the storyteller keeps for himself. The place that he offers to the intuitive attention of She who reads omens, to the dissertations of the friend and the brother, in a fragile sharing.

The Sands: The drunken swirling of the world’s engagements, where everyone chants and enchants. Suffering also all sufferings. The Sands are not infertile. They bring silence amidst all this noise round about.' (5)

from The Cry of the World
‘(A whole chunk of reality, seized from a recalcitrant past, redistributed into every corner of life, repeated in each book:)
The trace is not an unfinished path where one stumbles helplessly, nor an alley closed on itself, bordering a territory. The trace goes into the land, which will never again be a territory. The trace is an opaque way of experiencing the branch and the wind: of being oneself, derived from the other. It is the truly disordered sand of utopia.
Trace thought enables us to move away from the strangulations of the system. It thus refutes the extremes of possession. It cracks open the absolute of time. It opens onto these diffracted times that human communities today are multiplying among themselves, through conflicts and miracles.
It is the violent wandering of the shared thought.' (10)

'And now having evoked languages under threat, langages on the way out, I come back to another of my torments and repeat something I have already said, like an echo streaked into a piece of chalk which in turn is carved from fragile limestone.' (16)

from Punctuations
‘In this way the poem forms a weave between the density of the place and the multiplicity of the diverse, between what is said here and what is heard over there.’ (112)

‘I also realize (and he pointed it out himself) that when we met it was always to share a trembling, tiny or revelatory, physical or social or political of the totality of the earth. Once in Florence, when the left-wing Catholic candidate La Pirra had just been elected mayor. In Algiers, the day of the Declaration of the Algerian Republic. In my home in Martinique, when a cyclone was about to pass over our heads and we stood at the window breathing the smell of lead and speculating on all those clouds that formed a blockade in the sky. Different places, but tethered to the same concern, governed by the same hope. The hope of a bright spell to come, the threat of an uncontrollable excess. It is as though we had to repeat, all of us together, in the hazards of our existence, this common place of the intellectual and creative life of our time: to roam the imagination of the world to come to the debate of our own surroundings, or vice versa.’ (112)

'Because he very soon comes across these moments where the green confronts the blue, for example, and the black irrupts into the mass of light brown, like a volcanic island in a sea of faded lava: in other words, these internal articulations of the text as a whole. And it is not linear as we had thought. It requires the pleasure of a different kind of reading. The blue contaminates the green, the light orange pushes the black to its greatest excesses, and we never know how they will all react to being woven together in this way, which both constrains and liberates them. The word works on itself, arises each time from its own birth, its contradiction, its internal Relation, the enormous duration accumulated from so many revelatory dispersals. The mass that emerges from this is a dizzying Whole-World, which involves us. ‘We are the sum of all that’.’ (124)

‘This book has brought together for us what was scattered, crossed out (writing like an obstinate scratching), the most beneficial corruptions, and what there will be in his later books of music, of illness and death, an endless dust. But one which comes together as granite, as pillars of lava. As a totem, devastated humanity, carves its shadow in the stone, as a language invents itself within language, like a world. Burst open, winding, its colours shimmering, its subject matter dispersed, and at the same time full and compact. Like a rock [roche]. It seems to me that everything that we shout out in the exaltation and excitement of the world-thought, Maurice Roche carefully invents it, under the accumulation of crossings out, which taken together in(tro)duces – to talk like Roche – such a field of energies. The question remains, for all of us who are perhaps blind to our time: ‘How can we now tell apart day and night?’ We consult Compact, which is our Braille in these shadows.’ (125)

[Jean-Sylvain · Rating 4 out of 5]

J'appelle Tout-monde notre univers tel qu'il change et perdure en échangeant et, en même temps, la «vision» que nous en avons. La totalité-monde dans sa diversité physique et dans les représentations qu'elle nous inspire: que nous ne saurions plus chanter, dire ni travailler à souffrance à partir de notre seul lieu, sans plonger à l'imaginaire de cette totalité. (p.176)

[Javier Ponce · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as instructive as Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity, and its mixed style of essay and prose does not compensate for the lack of rich content.