Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss

Abstract

What does geographic thought do to philosophy? What should philosophy do with a geographic way of thinking? John Drabinski's reading of Édouard Glissant's work—a body of work shaped through and by a geographic thinking—invites readers to consider these questions. Glissant and the Middle Passage makes clear the ways in which theoretical explorations of both modernity and possibilities of breaking with modernity's historical violence fall short when theory fails to heed to the centrality of a Caribbean geography. By extension, Drabinski's book lays out Glissant's singular interventions as vital for the completeness of these theoretical explorations. That is to say, Glissant and the Middle Passage not only makes the compelling case for placing the Caribbean—its attendant histories of Middle Passage, plantation, movement and migration—at the center of questions about and for modernity. It also argues, quite effectively, for why this endeavor requires Glissant, why the intervention of Glissant's poetics of errantry, opacity, and Relation (to name but a few) better enables philosophical thinking to fully theorize the constitution of meaning in the modern context. On that question of meaning, the five chapters of Glissant and the Middle Passage will tell us that any method concerned with possibilities of radical futures, or how to make sense of a decolonial possibility (a break, as it were) emerging from and against modernity's colonial violence, is one that ought to seriously engage with Glissant's placement of the Caribbean as a unique site of geographic thought. To say this differently, Glissant and the Middle Passage foregrounds Caribbeanness as, itself, a method that is necessary for navigating these and related question sets.In that vein, Drabinski's account positions the geography of the Caribbean—the islands, their shoreline, the Atlantic Ocean, and the trace of haunting history that lies on its floor—as the “crossroads of modernity” (x). As with all crossroads, the Caribbean becomes a site at which something otherwise emerges, new and unanticipated, in what at that crossroads signifies as movement through material history. Negotiations with history and memory emerge otherwise. Conceptions of world-making against the backdrop of history and memory emerge otherwise. How identity is lived through the passage of time, and in relation to place, emerge otherwise. Ultimately, Drabinski's book offers Glissant's philosophy as a methodology for tracing these various modulations of “otherwise.” But perhaps most importantly, in turning to Glissant for this methodology, Drabinski shows that this—the emergence of modulations of “otherwise” is what thinking encounters when it begins with the Caribbean. And this is because, at the site of the Caribbean (modernity's crossroads that it is), beginning begins otherwise. Readers of Glissant and the Middle Passage read this as the work's first premise—that beginning as concept, as imperative, as possibility, and as event signifies differently when the geography of the Caribbean is where the project of (and prospects for) thinking begins.What that means is that, with the Caribbean as ground and frame, “abyss” is where thinking begins. Drabinski's work gives an account of how Glissant is informed by this abyssal thinking, and ultimately why, as philosophers, we need his poetics in order to think in terms of abyss. This is where everything must start, that from which everything must begin. We might even say that as readers of Glissant and the Middle Passage we are asked to understand everything in the wake of the histories that constitute the Caribbean (that constitute modernity's beginning) as abyssal—the subject, her relationship to place, world-making endeavors and their socialities. This centrality of the abyssal ultimately centers the Middle Passage, or more specifically, the ways in which the Middle Passage presents to thought a catastrophe that must remain un-representable. Or, to put this differently, this founding premise of the abyssal is the Middle Passage as founding premise, given over to thinking as what, in its singular violence, must remain unthinkable. And yet, it is this unthinkable history that thought must think (the un-theorizable about which theory must theorize). Drabinski's chapters are ultimately deep engagements (led by a Glissantian poetics) with what happens at this juncture, with the ways in which philosophy itself doesn't break but rather bends, becomes Glissant's “para-philosophy” (xvii). With the notion of the abyssal, or the singular violence of the Middle Passage (and, indeed, what that singularity means for memory and moving with that memory into the present) as the first premise, Drabinski writes that “the logic and economy of the para—as a decisive supplement and hyphen—will be demonstrated as the chapters [of Glissant and the Middle Passage] unfold” (xvii).It is of interest to note that, from the book's treatment of Glissant, we see that the irretrievable loss of the Middle Passage (the irreparable rupture it inserts into history) does not constitute the end of thinking. Rather, it sets the stage for thinking to begin, albeit in another sense. It is this other sense (this “para-” of philosophy) for which Drabinski urges a turning to Glissant. Furthermore, Drabinski's treatment conveys that thinking in the context of the New World must begin in this other sense. It seems as though, as readers, we are meant to see this other sense as a corrective of sorts to not treating the abyssal (not treating the Middle Passage) as the conceptual center. Much of the book's first chapter articulates a case for this corrective, showing how, in this turn to Glissant, thinking becomes definitively not Continental, and moves beyond a definitively European geography around which Continental thought is orientated. For instance, from those geographic assumptions, the Continental thinking of Europe formulates a conception of historical trauma in response to the impossibility of memory. Whereas history as memory moves us into a relation with the past for the sake of orientation and grounding, history as trauma understands this temporal movement as thwarted, or perhaps at best, stalled. Trauma, in the context of Continental thinking, is about encountering the past as what remains covered over and inaccessible, but what might nonetheless offer ground for the present, and for the present's re-construction of the meaning of that past.In other words, Continental thinking still regards, as possible, a past being made legible for a memory project in the present. Of Walter Benjamin's formulation of this kind of possibility, Drabinski writes, “While Benjamin's angel [of History] witnesses an ever-increasing pile of corpses, the corpses show themselves…. The negative sublime, the cinder, the ashes—while each attempts to perform the impossibility of its own utterances in a word or phrase, it is important to underscore how they maintain, even in self-dismantling failure, the fundamental visibility of loss and memory of the dead” (36, emphasis added).What this means is that, with this still-intact capacity for naming and locating the ruin of the past, a Continental sense of history as trauma is not yet the abyssal sense of history and trauma that the Middle Passage shapes as a Caribbean memory project of the present. Furthermore, this Continental thinking does not yet respond to the abyssal demands of a memory project of the present. On Drabinski's account, the ruin that is the catastrophe of the Middle Passage is marked by the abyssal and abounding silence of bodies drowned, and is the site at which an archipelagic (instead of Continental) thinking begins. To think with and from the Caribbean, in this archipelagic sense, offers to philosophical thinking re-worked concepts of time, place, subject, and sociality. As Glissant and the Middle Passage successfully demonstrates, these re-workings are generative in their possibility for thinking decolonially, which is to say, for thinking in terms of a break with coloniality. It is across this moment of possibility that Drabinski's work calls for engagement with the constellation of methodologies that orient critical black feminist theory Native studies, queer studies and decolonial theory more broadly—all of which theorize the meaning and possibility of breaks, of radical futures, as well as the possibility of reading the past-present differently for another future.With a Continental framing of the question of trauma, the corpse marks loss, but its modality of marking loss still traffics in legibility. And this is because, in a context that doesn't yet include the modality of loss grounded in the Middle Passage, the corpse is locatable. To open the question of trauma with Glissant, however, is to contend with loss as both submarine—unrecoverable on the ocean's floor—and oceanic—no “where” in particular because it is everywhere in general (it is a loss as vast as the sea itself). It is in this sense that the question of trauma, as it emerges out of the Caribbean context (which is, at the same time, a New World context that implicates Europe), references loss that never re-presents itself. From the present, it is encountered as abyssal, and as an opacity that refuses modalities of re-representation and legibility. Hence, Caribbean blackness (blackness at the crossroads of modernity, and so blackness as it creates modernity) generates, for thinking, an imperative to begin in/out of this abyss. Drabinski reminds us that, for Glissant, this imperative is very much in the ethical sense: “Glissant infuses the question of beginning with an ethics beholden to a specter” (47). In other words, thinking becomes the imperative to “honor our boats” (48) when thinking begins with/in the Caribbean.What, then, does thinking like an archipelago mean for thought, and what does this do to thought, such that these openings of decolonial possibility emerge? Again, Drabinski's situating of the abyssal is central to fleshing out these questions. For one (and this is particularly clear in his articulation of “birth abyss” and “root abyss” in the first chapter), the abyssal captures the work of the formulation, “loss of loss” (56). In the Caribbean context, the capacities for making legible what has been lost to the violence of Middle Passage and plantation are themselves unavailable; the very presence of what was lost remains unrecoverable and refuses articulation. Hence, as a method of thinking and of interrogating history, the Caribbean begins with the abyssal. “Death without the body as wreckage and remainder” (50). Here, Drabinski's reference to “wreckage” serves as a reminder of what, in the European/Continental conception of historical trauma, is at least a presence of what is to be mourned (the wreckage of corpses can at least be made legible to/for a memory project).Instead, when history begins with this more abyssal sense of loss, the work of memory and by extension, the work of asking questions of history (namely, the question, “What happened here?”) takes on the shape of the abyssal. Radical absence—insisting on its right to opacity—shapes navigation in the present and toward the future in ways that, for Glissant, offers an imaginary that takes on the task of living (and living-with) otherwise. To be sure, abyssal beginning makes certain things impossible: knitting together the fragmented remains of historical violence for the sake of restoring an original; locating voices that might give an account for the question to history, “What happened here?”; taking root in a ground without having to live in the ground's tortured entanglement with bodies drowned. Abyssal beginning makes it impossible for life to go on without an inevitable entanglement with the bitterness of irreconcilable loss. For Glissant, these impossibilities simply clear ground for new possibilities, new methods and poetics that Drabinski suggests “would have satisfied Frantz Fanon's famous call for a new humanism” (65).The later chapters of Glissant and the Middle Passage address this question of how we might read Glissant and Fanon alongside each other (a question that should have stakes for decolonial thinkers motivated by Fanon's call for a new humanism). Drabinski shows that the possibility of newness (of a pure future whose break with the past of colonial domination is sufficiently radical) shapes the trajectories of both thinkers. Nevertheless, there is at least one nuanced difference, which Drabinski sketches. On my reading, his sketch is a helpful way not only to think of Glissant and Fanon together, but also to get a fuller sense of how “possibility” and “newness” uniquely signify in a Glissantian method. For Fanon, decolonization (as what would bring about an “otherwise” future) calls for a total and complete substitution of the “now.” This is because, unlike what we see in Glissant's method of Caribbeanness, there is nothing in the “now” for someone like Fanon, which might produce something otherwise. This is in somewhat of a sharp contrast with Glissant's reliance on what Drabinski refers to as the “counter-hegemonies” (202) that the abyssal (birth abyss, root abyss) and its attendant fracturing of what constitutes the “now” make possible. Glissant's poetics and imaginary generates this “otherwise” from/within the interstices of colonialism's totality, interstices whose traction in possibility is as a consequence of the work of the abyssal.Hence, out of this “abyss: work, world-making and memory projects in the present work with fragments that are of the past, but avail themselves to a re-knitting (and re-mixing) that takes them beyond the totality of that past. Fragments within a Caribbean imaginary, as a consequence of archipelagic thinking, relate to without being tethered in history's totality. Products (aesthetic, creative, poetic) are not about combining to reproduce some lost original (what is lost is lost as abyssal, and so this project of returning to the past in order to retrieve/re-knit together an original whole is the impossibility in the Caribbean context). Rather, world-making that stays with fragmentation means that fragments can be entangled in new ways, ways that are for the sake of (new) emergence instead of faithfulness to a lost origin. Entanglement for the sake of emergence calls for moving in time (and in relation to place) rhizomatically, which is to say, not for the sake of taking root (statically and possessively) in place, but rather with an understanding that ground is tortured (ground is an entanglement of history's pain and possibilities for living). The rhizome movements are movements of a nomadic subject (which names a certain way of being a subject in a world-making project that must begin with birth abyss and root abyss). It is the movement of the subject who is shaped by the repeated need to begin, and begin again, because abyssal beginning is both loss of loss and the impossibility of continuity. Sociality produced in this way is tenuous and fragile, which is already no longer the rooted, “for the sake of colonial sovereignty” relation to place. Something otherwise emerges. A counter-hegemonic way happens, within and against the colonial totality. On Drabinski's analysis, Caribbean rhizomatic articulation of place (and of being in relation in place) unfolds in something other than the logic of possession; it is both postcolonial and decolonial insofar as it is something other than a rigid defense of place relation (xviii).Though Glissant and the Middle Passage is not entirely devoted to principles of creolization, its detailed articulation of how these conceptions of abyss, fragment, rhizome, and nomadic subject build a poetics otherwise is of value to scholarship that aims to offer creolization as a frame out of which decolonial theory might emerge. If the task is to conceptualize the possibility of a decolonial “otherwise,” or the possibility of a radical rupture from what shapes human and nonhuman life as a colonial totality, then the story of creolizing entanglement is a worthwhile addition to this theoretical practice. Drabinski's laying out of Glissant's para-philosophy (how its attendant frames are informed through the singularity of the Middle Passage and the Caribbean) shows that entanglement brings a necessary complexity to the meaning of “break,” or rupture. To say this differently, entanglement (and the notion of abyss at the center) necessarily complicates the meaning of “beginning,” or how the determinations of the “after” of colonialism's catastrophe ultimately unfold. If there is a foundational question driving the analyses of Drabinski's work, it is this question of beginning, where and how “beginning” derives its possibility when world-making is at the shore-line, after the loss of loss. This sense of world-making is what creolization aims to conceptualize, and in so doing offers to theory the possibility not only of thinking differently about conceptions like subjectivity and community. More than this, creolization's object is a sense of world-making that also does differently “subjectivity” and “community.”And so, alongside the case it makes for Glissant's para-philosophy as vital for thinking in terms of the Caribbean (that crossroads of modernity), Drabinski's work also serves as a reminder that the principle of creolization is more than a celebration of cultural mixing and/or cultural contact, and more than a celebration muddled identity-boundaries. He reminds his readers of creolization's value (its explanatory power, as it were) in being able to theorize how theory itself must change if it is to be accountable to the Caribbean and to the Middle Passage (to those “boats” that Glissant urges us to honor, as we do this thing called “theory”). Out of creolization's principles, we are able to understand influence beyond rubrics of comparison/measure (the “all” of the global does not compromise the singularity of the local). We are able to understand Relation beyond an organizational frame of otherness-as-threat (Relation, Drabinski summarizes, simply is “with” an Other). Out of fragmentation (the “after” of history's ruin), creolization is able to offer a sense of place without root, and a sense of (nomadic/rhizomatic) belonging without sovereignty. It is as such that Drabinski marks these fecund possibilities as “Glissant's second wave of decolonization,” which weaves its theoretical tentacles through “the meaning of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics,” much like those adventitious roots of the mangrove (xvii).Like the mangrove that grows in the swampy border of land and sea, Caribbeanness (as method, as what concretizes principles of creolization, as that around which Glissant's poetics orbits) is about setting up subjectivity (self-invention) as fragile, in need of repeatedly beginning. As a metaphor for thinking this way of identity-making and world-making, Drabinski describes the mangrove as follows: “Death and life intertwined without melancholy” (46). Identity-making and world-making (indeed, the production of meaning itself) happens this way, when the obligation is to begin with the abyss. Glissant and the Middle Passage is much more than this, but even if it was solely for its careful attention to this obligation to the abyss of the Middle Passage, it is a vital intervention into our varied tasks of theorizing possibilities of an otherwise future.