Abyssal Beginnings: Glissant, Philosophy, and the Middle Passage

Abyssal Beginnings: Glissant, Philosophy, and the Middle Passage demonstrates how the work of Caribbean theorist Édouard Glissant marks an important, decisive transformation of the central motifs in contemporary European philosophy. Problems of time, subjectivity, history, language, and memory are central to Glissant’s literary and theoretical writings, and so we should not be surprised to find such an important engagement with recent European philosophy in his work. Yet, and this is the primary motivation for the present project, those very ideas with which Glissant is engaged are transformed by the experience of the Americas. This book is about Glissant’s articulation of that experience and transformation, about how the distinctively Caribbean experience of the Middle Passage, slavery, and colonialism alters philosophy’s fundamental categories.

This transformation has two essential sites.

First, there is Glissant’s overt and critical evocation of contemporary philosophical motifs, in particular Heidegger’s notions of language and history and Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of rhizome and nomad. For Glissant, these motifs touch what is most pressing about the postcolonial situation of the Caribbean. For the cultural process of decolonization and the recovery or creation of ‘Caribbeanness,’ a sense of how history provokes a rethinking of language and subjectivity is crucial. Yet the experience of the Americas – the Middle Passage and its aftermath of slavery and colonialism – marks those very moments of rethinking with trauma and loss. How are philosophical motifs altered by these historically specific traumas and losses? How does Glissant’s work render that alteration as both destructive and productive for conceiving life after trauma and loss? That is, how does the pain of the past register as important for the future of not just ethics and politics, but also epistemology, metaphysics, and aesthetics? To this end, Abyssal Beginnings argues that language, history, memory, and subjectivity emerge from this transformational pain of the past as a new poetics. This new poetics attends to the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical demands of a traumatic past while at the same time creating a future from the mixture of cultural meanings Glissant calls ‘Caribbeanness’ – i.e., ‘Caribbeanness’ as both character and method.

Second, and more broadly, there is the important contribution Glissant makes to philosophy in light of increasing critical attention to the relationship between philosophical discourse, nationality, nationalism, race, and globalization. As a Caribbean theorist concerned with all of these issues, and so with their particularly Caribbean resonance, Glissant is a vital, even indispensable philosophical voice for theorists concerned with difference. For Glissant, one thinks in a specific geographical and historical moment. Thinking and theorizing is therefore productively lodged within the cultural and political relations – no matter how violent, no matter how traumatic – that produce language and meaning. The historical moment and geographical site of the Caribbean becomes constitutive of the meaning of philosophy, rather than something to be transcended by the task of thinking. This historical moment is poised between the break with the colonial past (the political phase of decolonization) and the forging of a future in a globalized intellectual space (the cultural phase of postcolonial work), both of which unfold in the wake of the Middle Passage. This historical moment is saturated with ideas from other shores – the Caribbean is a poly-cultured site – and yet those ideas undergo decisive transformations at the very moment of their arrival in the Caribbean context. Engaging Glissant between Europe and the Americas is thus never a matter of justifying the latter by way of the former. Transformation is paramount. If one is to take philosophy seriously as a cross-border enterprise, engaging in the sorts of critiques and complications that come from such border crossings, then this mixing of shores is an urgent task.

Abyssal Beginnings is a book about the transformation of ideas across borders, across histories, and so across the different demands of a future. It is a book about the repetitive yet always unique human obsession with beginning again, this time between Europe and the Americas – a beginning that creolizes in the between, and so neither seeks dependency upon European ideas nor forgets the presence of those ideas in the intellectual geography of Glissant’s Caribbean.

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Abyssal Beginnings is comprised of five chapters. The opening chapter examines Glissant’s treatment of memory’s concern with the past by tracing Glissant’s return to the site of trauma – through threshold figures of the island of Gorée and the shorelines of Africa and the Americas – in order to break apart conventional models of remembering and representation. Central to this first (and second) chapter is the abyssal figure of the sea, a figure that names the difference and distance Glissant gains from European theorizations of trauma and loss. Rooted in that reworked conception of past, memory, and representation, Chapter Two looks to Glissant’s deployment of memory’s concern with the past for the sake of another kind of future. Rather than with melancholy, Glissant responds to the pain of the past by affirming the fragmented, archipelagic possibilities born from an abyssal beginning. That is, Glissant affirms the specifically Caribbean geography of thinking, rather than rooting thought in tradition, History, or any notion that presupposes a coherent relation to the past. That coherence is lost in traumatic experience, yet Glissant’s work on the future affirms this loss as also bearing possibility. Chapter Three develops the sense of subjectivity implied by Glissant’s account of memory’s double movement. If beginning is abyssal and there is always beginning again (the claims developed across the opening two chapters), then subjectivity must be nomadic. Of particular interest in this chapter is Glissant’s explicit practice of creolization – in this case, a creolization of Deleuze and Guattari’s descriptions of the subject as rhizome and nomad. The theoretical work on subjectivity is translated into the question of practice in Chapter Four, in particular around the question of aesthetics. What sort of production ought to be generated by a creolized nomadic, rhizomatic subject? To this end, the fourth chapter studies two aesthetic sites – Raoul Peck’s documentary Lumumba: Death of a Prophet and Glissant’s work on Faulkner – in order to elaborate the implications of Glissant’s ontology of the subject for an aesthetics and poetics. The preceding work on memory, subjectivity, and aesthetics is gathered into in a concluding Chapter Five, in which I look at Glissant’s conception of the meaning of the intellectual and intellectual work. This problematic places him in critical dialogue with important intellectual predecessors Aime Césaire, Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, and others regarding, as one central example, the meaning of national literature for the formation of a collectivity.