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“Whether they are collective or individual names, the pre-Socratics, the Romans…all the proper names which come and go in Nietzsche’s texts are neither signifiers or signifieds, but designate intensities on a body which can be the body of the Earth, the body of the book, as well as Nietzsche’s own suffering body: I am every name in history…There is a kind of nomadism, a perpetual migration of the intensities designated by proper names, and these interpenetrate one another as if they are lived on a full body. The intensity can be lived only in relation to its mobile inscription on a body, and to the moving exteriority of a proper name, and this is what it means for a proper name to be always a mask, the mask of an operator.” (Deleuze)
I’ve been looking for the doubled site between Deleuze and Glissant on the question of nomadic thinking and rhizomatics. Read the rest of this entry »
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 is history to us? I’ll start with a big claim: it is certainly a, if not the, labor against memory, and so a labor against pain and loss. Historical narrative obscures what one remembers of the pain in that narrative, how that pain is not only passed along through collective memories, but also is constitutive of the identities of those collectives. If history claimed only a marginal practice for itself, or even just that it works alongside memory without questions of legitimacy and truth, then we could tell a different story about history’s kind of story. Read the rest of this entry »
