Toward Relation: Negritude, Poststructuralism, and the Specter of Intention in the Work of Édouard Glissant

Abstract

The has always brought us to the absolute prescience of the Whole-world.-Edouard Glissant, Praise of the Different and of DifferenceIntention perfects itself in Relation.-Edouard Glissant, Poetic IntentionMuch attention has recently been paid to the work of Edouard Glissant in the arena of postcolonial studies, and much of this attention has (arguably) focused on Glissant's later political and aesthetic theory, vested in the concept of relation as well as the related category of the tout-monde. While this recent criticism recognizes the profound linguistic complexity of this political theory of difference, Glissant's key early concept of poetic is often glossed and elided in favor of an emphasis on those of his concepts that are more amenable to the received poststructuralist wisdom surrounding language: the emphasis on the death of the author, the autonomy of the work, and the no doubt rich and evocative necessity of an emphasis on difference (or, indeed, differance) 3 The not-so-subde evocation I have just made of the perhaps three key figures in French theoretical disavowals of as a meaningful category of literary interrogation-Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida-is of course not accidental. I evoke the concept of the death of the author and of the primacy of discourse and of difference precisely in order to emphasize the simultaneous relation and diegetic difference between this tradition and Glissant's work.I would propose an alternative by suggesting that analysis of the category of might serve as a key prism through which to position Glissant's unique contribution. As my first epigraph (taken from a 2006 keynote address) suggests, intention remains central to Glissant's elaboration of the rightly recognized ideas of difference and relation. But what precisely does it mean for Glissant to bind to the recognition of difference and relation?2 If for those thinkers bound to the poststructuralist emphasis on difference, the trace, and discourse (to name merely a few central terms in this tradition's lexicon) the is for the most part an illusory phantom presence obscuring the more salient play of signification and its vicissitudes, then it would seem perverse (at least from an orthodox poststructuralist perspective) for Glissant to tie to relation and difference. A genealogy of the development of relation through in Glissant does not imply a naive move and instead precisely thickens and deepens the recognition of the play of discourse and difference emphasized by such figures as Foucault and Derrida. By historicizing the condition of colonial dispossession and the linguistic experience of Martiniquan Creole in particular, Glissant insists upon the necessity of a certain strategic avowal of intentionality with its self-conscious particularity: what he names and develops as beginning early in his career. In Poetics of Relation, opacity comes to stand for an irreducibility of terms in a relation of difference.3 This irreducibility, Glissant insists, must be retained as a right, even in the face of the embrace of and exchange between positions in a relation of difference. Opacity, amid all else, stands for the maintenance of a line of division that refuses in that relation to permit the fate of being signified by the Occidental other. In resisting this, Glissant argues that and its conscious resistance to colonial linguistic hierarchies is the initial move in a maneuver toward the ethical recognition of difference. As such, Glissant's theoretical abstraction from the concrete Martiniquan experience of colonization develops across his oeuvre to critique too-ready avowals of linguistic and discursive play even as a difference undergirded by relation represents the outcome of his intellectual itinerary. Indeed, without opacity, one has misunderstood relation-in its attenuation to the concrete historicity of the collectivities who would embrace it. …