Thinking with Glissant

In Spring 2022, the Theory Center Reading Group at Indiana University- Bloomington was devoted to the work of Martinican writer and thinker Édouard Glissant. We focused on his Poetics of Relation (Poétique de la Relation 1990, English tr. 1997), while also engaging with the recently translatedTreatise on the Whole-World (Traité du Tout-Monde, 1996, English tr. 2020). An award-winning fiction and poetry writer, Glissant (1928-2011) is arguably the most influential Caribbean thinker of the 20th century, who over the course of his career developed a unique aesthetic and philosophical lexicon that has shaped the language and perspectives of successive generations of theorists in poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and globalization. His works cover virtually all genres and forms, from lyrical poetry to scholarly studies, from historical and experimental fiction to philosophical essays and political manifestos on topics as enduring and as urgent as slavery, racism, (neo)colonialism, creolization, and the “chaos-world.” Concepts such as opacity, Relation, “archipelagic” and “trembling” thinking, rhizomatic identity, and the “Whole-World” generated conversations with thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Derek Walcott, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Achille Mbembe and others. Moreover, Glissant and his late idea of the “entour” have also influenced a younger generation of scholars in environmental humanities, intermediality and visual arts, and alter-globalization. In 2020, the Glissant Translation Project started publishing Glissant’s works in English in a comprehensive manner, attesting to the growing interest in his work far beyond the confines of his native Antilles and a Francophone audience to readers across the globe

Glissant and the Politics of Coordination

This is an ironic moment for Edouard Glissant’s growing community of readers. So many are discovering Glissant’s work for the first time, myself included, in part because a fervent commitment to a politics of recognition now dominates in many corners of the humanities. This is ironic largely because while the choice to engage with Glissant might be motivated by an all too generalized logic of recognition, to read Glissant is to learn about how the basic premises underpinning this logic are deeply misguided. The politics of recognition, as a term of art, after all, is built on the conceptual planks made available by the standardizing impulses of the nation-state form and capitalism combined. Glissant, on the other hand, is nothing if not a theorist calling fervently for a path forward that does not depend on the complicities found in the conceptual imperialism inherent to the bureaucratic standardizing practices that bolster both the nation-state and contemporary capitalism. Glissant calls instead for an approach that offers the philosophical building blocks for a politics of coordination, which is described in Patchell Markell’s book, Bound by Recognition (2003) as a politics of acknowledgement.  This politics entails forgingan alternative approach to the self and other, to identity and place, and to social orders in general than what the politics of recognition espouses

A Merleau-Pontian Critique of Sartrean Philosophy of Negation

The phenomenological ontologies of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty have often been discussed in comparison to one another. Often, a Merleau-Pontian critique of Sartre, based on subjectivity, has been given. In doing so, both Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s views on freedom, facticity, the body, and the Other has been discussed in great detail. Despite all of this, however, not much emphasis has been given to their understanding of negativity in its relation to the construction of Self as the Being-in-the-world of human-reality. Accordingly, this article will focus on the relationship between subjectivity and negativity in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty with a specific emphasis on Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Sartre’s philosophy of negation. First, the article will expand on Sartre’s philosophy of negation and explain how he conceives the experience of nothingness as the foundation of subjectivity. Later, it will develop a Merleau-Pontian critique of Sartrean philosophy of negation (a) by claiming that Sartrean negativity degenerates into pure and absolute positive of the Cartesian duality, and most importantly, (b) by showing how Merleau-Ponty constructs a new dialectical ontology of Self, based on the world-as-me; a being that is seen as flesh

Merleau-Ponty and Derrida on Husserl’s Origin of Geometry

Abstract: A number of claims made by Derrida concerning Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Husserl will be carefully considered and evaluated here. First, Derrida’s claim that Merleau-Ponty’s mis-interprets Husserl’s letter to Lévy-Bruhl will be challenged. Secondly, Derrida’s claim that his criticism of Husserl’s phenomenology can be applied just as well to Merleau-Ponty’s will be challenged. Thirdly, it is a careful consideration of textual evidence that will be used to support these challenges. Finally, Merleau-Ponty’s late lectures will take us back to the Lévy-Bruhl letter and finally to Merleau-Ponty’s own phenomenology of language, one that integrates perception and language and yet that still privileges not eidetic essences or linguistic expression but perception as its primary term.                                

Book Review: Jill Jarvis, Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021)

Jill Jarvis’s book Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony is a promising contribution to the flourishing research being done in the field of Memory Studies, that is challenging the Western and in this case the French politics of testimony from the postcolonial point of view. This book can be read from the larger ethical-political perspective in the field of International Relations, where there is a growing demand for Reconciliation Commissions to address archives beyond the legal framework. The book, as the title suggests, brings together both Postcolonial Studies and Memory studies in the context of Algerian history. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Jarvis’s deconstructive approach to testimony and memory examines how literature archives the two as forms of resilience, as bearers of witness to experiences that surpass both time and space to fill the gaps in official forms of testimony. As more and more nations are demanding compensation from their perpetrators for past violence and crime against humanity on the political front, this book’s relevance is heightened with its demand for justice and reform, and not merely to forgive and forget. The work of deconstruction that Jarvis undertakes to break down familiar language through reflections on the idea of Muslim, justice, witness, and revolt among others, she critiques the age-old practices of testimonial interrogations and censure that destabilises the multifaceted embodiment of Empire. “France remains constitutively haunted by the empire that it has tried both to exorcise and atone for (12)” succinctly covers the period of Algerian colonisation in 1830 to France’s continued endeavour to redeem and absolve itself from its colonial violence that has been and still remains under the shroud of wilful Western amnesia. Jarvis attempts to expose the denial of the paradox of the French Republican values they are so proud of, to demand justice and reform for the most abject

‘A definite quantity of all the differences in the world’: Glissant, Spinoza, and the Abyss as True Cause

In a conversation with Manthia Diawara aboard the Queen Mary II in 2009, Édouard Glissant elaborated his definition of Relation, a concept that he formally presented in his book Poétique de la relation in 1990, but that emerged out of years of writing about creolization and cultural action in the Caribbean. Sitting at the ship’s window, with the Atlantic Ocean crashing around him, Glissant explains that “the truth that is increasingly coming to light about Black reality in the New World is the truth of multiplicity, the truth of the step towards the Other.

Into the Looking Glass: The Mirror of Old Age in Beauvoir and Améry

Although the pandemic's early months were witness to a nearly unprecedented level of public concern for the plight of the old, such attention did not lead to much sustained analysis into either the concrete experience of old age or the many ways in which a greater knowledge of aging might prove instructive for rethinking the possibilities of contemporary philosophy and social change. The present paper seeks to pursue this otherwise neglected line of inquiry by recovering a previously unexplored episode from the history of social theory in which Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Améry set themselves before the mirror of old age in order to there explore reflections as inimical to their time as our own. For what this intertextual scene of contestation so clearly demonstrates is that the aging body is itself a body of knowledge capable of transforming the very ideologies and social systems that continue to deform the lives of old and young alike

Fanon and Hair

What would it mean to think about Frantz Fanon’s work on race, embodiment, and identity in the context of the contemporary cultural politics of Black hair? Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks offers us some key terms for deepening our engagement with this issue and, in that continuing relevance, tells us something important about the persistence of the colonial gaze in contemporary life. The discourse around black hair has evolved to mean more than what it meant in the 1960s and 1970s. Though it continues to revolve around the symbol of black beauty, celebration and resistance, the symbol is not exclusive to one single hairstyle choice. One of the perils of freedom is the ability to exercise the right of choice. That includes the freedom to choose how you want to look and what language you want to speak. This is about giving agency to black bodies to make choices that make meaning for them and not define it around the white gaze or white ear.  In trying to create safe spaces, we must take caution as not to create barriers around new thoughts and ideas that are uncategorizable. The existence of blackness has long been denied so we should take caution to not disqualify aesthetics that do not fit a specific type of mold. As a black woman born to Senegalese parents, raised in the United Arab Emirates and now living in the United States, I have always been around multiple cultures and that came with the ability to now speak multiple languages (Wolof, English, Arabic and French). And my hair journey…has ranged from having an Afro, braids, perming my hair, going through a period of transition, wearing it natural, adding extensions and the list goes on. Many have tried to disqualify my blackness for one reason or another. But, in no way am I less Black than another because of a hairstyle choice or the languages I speak. My blackness has always been spoken to me by my family. My blackness is a constant reminder to me by society. My blackness is rooted in my experiences. My blackness is rooted in my very existence. As long as I continue to live in my black body, no one can take away my blackness, and all the marvelousness it is capable of. To this, Fanon might suggest I read his Black Skin, White Masks as a way to explain my back-and-forth hair journey between natural and permed to further understand the effects of colonialism on the black psyche. Though Fanon’s perspective can explain so much this, I would like to put his text in dialogue with Rokhaya Diallo’s Afro where she compiles the experiences of 120 Afropeans, men and women, living in France and their experience of wearing their natural hair out. They range from professors, bankers to ministers and civil servants. Hair dictates a lot of factors in a black woman's life. Although they are talking about hair, their experience conveys what it means for a black body to exist in predominantly white spaces. By putting these two texts in dialogue, we can extend Fanon’s discourse around must black bodies conform when existing in white spaces? To what extent does Fanon’s theorization of black bodies in white spaces hold up?

Black Skin, White Masks and the Paradoxical Politics of Black Historiography

Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks has the paradoxical status of being a text that rejects historiography and History as a primary means of facilitating radical political transformation while also being a key point of departure for histories concerning modern colonial and decolonial thought.1 This reflection is an examination of the tensions in Black Skin, White Masks as a political work and as an intervention into philosophical, psychoanalytic, literary, and existential debates. Prompted by the 70th anniversary of the publication of Black Skin, White Masks, I examine the richness of the past two decades of historiographical scholarship on slavery, abolition, and freedom struggles in the Caribbean and North America alongside arguments that Fanon made about the limited role of history in sustaining and guiding anti-colonial thought and praxis. Black Skin, White Masks remains relevant, albeit troubling, for querying the presumed connections between historical knowledge, political action, and scholarly production facilitated by academic and political trends. I am interested in how the provocations of Black Skin, White Masks, in particular its last chapter “By Way of Conclusion,” provides fertile grounds for questioning, positioning, and refining contemporary historiographical production

The Lived Experience of Social Construction

A critical engagement with Black Skin, White Masks in the wake of social construction theory and controversies over critical race theory