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Abstract
In the film Édouard Glissant, One World in Relation (Diawara 2009), Glissant states that “borders are necessary in order to appreciate the passage from the flavor of one country to the flavor of another.” This statement inspires an exploration of the workings of borders in Glissant's work, focusing on his book Poetics of Relation and the film. It argues that Glissant holds an attachment to borders that is both pragmatic and ontological, and through which he generates a philosophy of the border as generative, distinguishing it from modernity's externalized borders to greater and lesser effect. It also suggests that there appears through Glissant, and often in spite of his own attachment to borders, a trembling sense of the possibility of borderlessness. Trembling is invoked throughout as a material and conceptual force with the propensity for destabilizing and even negating borders. Glissant's work is read through a number of performative scenes, including: Martin Heidegger's famous reaction to viewing photographs of Earth from space in 1966; the dance piece more, more, more … future (Citation2011) by Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula; Glissant's own half-ironic, and ultimately unrealized, suggestion for the making of the film; and scenes from One World in Relation of Glissant and Diawara exploring Martinique together.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands (1987), for example, is one of the early works in this development.
2 “To the extent that our consciousness of Relation is total, that is, immediate and focusing directly upon the realizable totality of the world, when we speak of a poetics of Relation, we no longer need to add: relation between what and what? This is why the French word Relation, which functions somewhat like an intransitive verb, could not correspond, for example, to the English term relationship” (Glissant Citation1997, 27).
3 Mary Pat Brady's Scales of Captivity is resonant with this, describing how spatial scale functions as a colonial tool of capture and homogenization, to the detriment of “the density of the felt” (Brady Citation2022, 4).
4 Heidegger writes: “All coming to presence, not only modern technology, keeps itself everywhere concealed to the last; nevertheless, it remains, with respect to its holding sway, that which precedes all: the earliest. The Greek thinkers already knew of this when they said: That which is earlier with regard to the arising that holds sway becomes manifest to us men only later. That which is primally early shows itself only ultimately to men. Therefore, in the realm of thinking, a painstaking effort to think through still more primally what was primally thought is not the absurd wish to revive what is past, but rather the sober readiness to be astounded before the coming of what is early” (Heidegger Citation1977, 22). In this way Heidegger readies us to recognize the trans-Atlantic slave trade as that which is “primally early” in the conversion of man to standing-reserve, even though he himself was not able to see it as it had not (yet) been revealed to him. He was in a sense not late enough (or “ultimate” enough) to see what was earliest.
5 "As far as my own orientation goes, in any case, I know that, according to our human experience and history, everything essential and of great magnitude has arisen only out of the fact that man had a home and was rooted in a tradition” (Heidegger Citation1981, 57).
6 This phrase, “the game of the world” also appears in Aimé Césaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, but there it is a matter of “playing the game of the world” rather than “taking sides” (Césaire Citation2013, 37).
7 If we remember Moten's reading of consent, we might understand Glissant to be saying not that this technology (of separability, or enframing) is agreed to, but that it is felt with; in other words, although it is not ideal, this technology is here, and therefore must be felt.
8 All speech in more, more, more … future is in French, and translations were kindly shared with me by Studios Kabako.
9 Glissant Citation1997, 91: “For us, the substitute for the hidden violence of these intolerant exclusions is the manifest and integrating violence of contaminations.”
10 Glissant explains that “the chaos-monde is only disorder if one assumes there to be an order … Chaos-monde is neither fusion or confusion: it acknowledges neither the uniform blend – a ravenous integration – nor muddled nothingness. Chaos is not ‘chaotic’” (Citation1997, 94).
11 The event was “Édouard Glissant, On the Right to Opacity, with Manthia Diawara.” Hosted by the Global South Center at Pratt University, New York, October 24, 2019.
12 This is the Angel whom Benjamin describes in his Theses on the Philosophy of History as standing with wings outstretched, gaze fixed on the wreckage of the past – a past to which he would attend, but that a strong wind is blowing in from paradise, forcefully spreading his wings out and back, and sending him hurtling toward a future that he cannot see.
13 “The power to experience the shock of elsewhere is what distinguishes the poet. Diversity, the quantifiable totality of every possible difference, is the motor driving universal energy, and it must be safeguarded from assimilations, from fashions passively accepted as the norm, and from standardized customs” (Glissant Citation1997, 29–30).
14 In “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date” Spillers urges black intellectuals to engage in a rethinking of this natal community, which carries the risk of becoming a static, and insufficiently complex, fiction. She makes a call instead for a conception of community that is resonant with Glissant's emphasis on change and difference, describing a “capacity to perceive community as a layering of negotiable differences. Doing so would allow us to understand how change, or altered positioning, is itself an elaboration of community, rather than its foundering” (Citation1994, 106).
15 “The tremulous thought is not a thought out of fear, scared thinking; it is thought that is opposed to systematic thinking. All the poets have said it. The gasping, the breathing, the pulse, the misfortunes, the fears, the insane hopes, and the sterile obsessions. All of these need to be relearned and remixed” (Glissant in Diawara Citation2009).
16 A conceptual trembling also appears in Fred Moten's statement about Glissant's theory of relation: “Social relation is an oxymoron that social entanglement causes to tremble” (Citation2018, 255).