Edouard Glissant Between the Singular and the Specific

If theoretical power was once contested in terms of global comprehension and universal application, there is little doubt that today, the supreme test of a theoretical approach to literary and cultural studies is its sensitivity to the irreducibly particular or specific. Few demands exercise such eagerly accepted authority over contemporary criticism as the imperative to pay attention to “context” and to the “specific” circumstances of a situation or a text. Recent cultural theory has generally downplayed primarily rhetorical or philosophical accounts of difference or différance for “theories that emphasize the embeddedness of every utterance in its particular social contexts.”² There is nothing so common in recent critical writing as affirmations of “an ever more complex understanding of difference and ‘marginality,’”³ of “the indeterminacy and multiplicity of contexts,”⁴ of the “particularities of places, characters, [and] historical trajectories. . . .”⁵ Postmodern theory especially, of course, celebrates “multiple, specific and heterogeneous ways of life”⁶ as an apparently automatic consequence of the invalidation of metanarratives and universal criteria. All postmodern order is presumed “local, emergent and transitory,”⁷ its every instance arranged in a particular configuration “that reflects the specificities of its setting.”⁸

It is the desired combination of a project both “post-identitarian” and context-specific that best explains, I think, the recent attention paid to the works of Edouard Glissant.⁹ Glissant has certainly written the most substantial francophone contribution toward an assertively Caribbean literature to date.¹⁰ His work has been widely celebrated as the militant foundation of a specifically situated literature. As novelist Patrick Chamoiseau insists, Glissant is “our great writer and our great thinker. Everything is there. [. . .] La Créolité takes place through and with Glissant’s thought.”¹¹ Glissant is famous for his assertions that “every way of speaking is a land [une terre],”¹² that “every man is created to speak the truth of his land.”¹³ Accordingly, his work has generally been read as a kind of affirmative “territorialization,” the empowerment of place consistent with the sophisticated recognition of other places. Unlike his older compatriot Aimé Césaire, Glissant’s work provides an apparently unambiguous affirmation of place, free both of the ambivalence of a return (to Africa or from Europe) and the mixed blessings of an incorporation (within the French departmental system).

However, Glissant’s recent work makes this affirmation look a lot less unambiguous. Glissant stands today as perhaps the most thoroughly Deleuzian writer in the francophone world. His recent Tout-monde (1993) and Poétique de la Relation (1990) provide, in fiction and in theory, an extraordinary tribute to Deleuze’s smoothly nomadological philosophy. No contemporary philosopher, perhaps, has done as much as Deleuze to combat notions of situated subjectivity, “territorialised” identity, and merely “specific” difference. To be sure, Deleuze’s work is often read precisely in terms of the subversion of all forms of universal rationality and monological integration, as an exemplary invocation of a world of pure otherness and difference. A more informed reading of Deleuze’s philosophy, however, will recognise its fundamental commitment to a radical ontological univocity, to a refusal of all forms of mediation (social, psychological, linguistic), even to the affirmation of a “world without others.” Deleuze’s philosophy presents a radically singular picture of the cosmos—the cosmos as one, self-dividing, self-creating substance, very close to Spinoza’s inspiration. His absolute or singular conception of difference, a difference without others, is expressly designed to exclude relative or specific conceptions of difference.¹⁴

Glissant’s recourse to Deleuzian concepts of individuation is one symptom of a major shift in his priorities, as much political as philosophical. Like that of Deleuze, Glissant’s later work begins and ends with the assertion of a single and unlimited ontological Totality, a wholly deterritorialized plane of immanence. Like Deleuze, Glissant now arrives at a theory of la Relation defined precisely by its elimination of relations with or between specific, positioned individuals. Like Deleuze, the later Glissant, I will argue, replaces a concept of the specific (or relative and co-constituent) with a concept of the singular (or absolute and self...