You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Dussel' category.
Glissant’s transmodern moment, which is something just different than the transmodern in Dussel’s sense, lies in his conception of relation identity. Relation identity uproots subjectivity – and so also collectivity – with a nomadic, rhizomatic conception of connection. Glissant takes the difficult path, here, opting for the affirmation (with all danger, detour in place) of both the pain and pleasure of separation from coloniality. In Poetics of Relation, he writes:
Glissant’s exposition and creative development of the concept of rhizome—and all attendant conceptions of times, memory, history, and the nomadic—gives his Poetics of Relation particular complexity. The problematic is really quite straightforward: what and who is the subject? The primary aim – even hope – of Glissant’s work is to produce or render a sense of Caribbeanness, a Caribbean subjectivity, which is something Fanon did not (could not?) accomplish. Why not Fanon? Fanon was the first to live his thinking, to paraphrase Glissant, and this “living” of his thinking delimits his theorizing of subjectivity. Now, Glissant’s remark sounds like praise of militancy, a kind of he-really-means-what-he-says admiration, but Glissant means here to underscore the fact that Fanon returned to Africa – both as a theorist and as an activist. Fanon, then, was seeking Africa, a root, a mother, a home. His work on negritude certainly gives plenty of evidence for Glissant’s remark. Read the rest of this entry »
What do my end-of-semester books tell me? I always ask.
I’ve been thinking for the past handful-plus years about how to translate Levinas’ work – which is so critically entrenched in the European experience – into the experience of the Americas – which is so critically disengaged from the European experience. This engagement/disengagement is hardly a firm limit. On the one hand, Levinas’ conception of the Other is so obviously indebted to the trajectory of European history, which he (not unproblematically) calls ‘the Bible and the Greeks.’ This debt is on display in his sense of critique (strategy) and exemplary historical cases (content). On the other hand, there is surely a case to be made for a general structure of transcendence to which we can attribute explanatory force, even if that force is, in the end, abut how such an explanation breaks apart. Read the rest of this entry »
