Ontological Magma: Between Difference and Relation

Abstract

Édouard Glissant undertakes a radical rethinking of ontology. The relations of creolization have key political and cultural consequences: they destabilize the Eurocentric foundations of knowledge; they affirm hybridity; they dislocate the colonial systems of power. Yet they also have another, perhaps even more consequential ambition. As Glissant says in Poetics of Relation, creolization contains an “attempt to get at Being.” Relation operates at the ontological level as a process of creation of a different constitution of being. Relation, which names the “new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere,” the diffracted “totalité-monde,” the event by which “[t]he elementary reconstitutes itself absolutely,” brings forth an ontological autopoeisis and reframing of the world