Towards the end of his life, Jorge Luis Borges is reported to have commented, to an unidentified ‘French poet friend’: It is this idea of a struggle with the Segalenian text — ‘tak[ing] the rest of your life to begin to understand’ — that this article adopts as its point of departure. The aim is to explore a specific example of what James Clifford, in the context of the posthumous engagement of the Breton writer and traveller Segalen with the painter Paul Gauguin, has called a ‘significant missed rendezvous’.⁴ The case in this study relates to the similarly skewed and posthumous dialogue between Segalen (1878–1919) and Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) — although on this occasion, it is the Breton author and theorist of diversity himself whose premature death prevented any actual meeting between the two men, and it is the Martinican novelist, poet and theorist who identified Segalen as a catalytic presence in his thought and as one of his privileged, lifelong interlocutors. The article considers the role of Segalen's work in the steady emergence and elaboration both of Glissant's thought and of the terminology that has increasingly served as a vehicle for it in the postcolonial field. The study also explores the place of Glissant's readings in the progressive reassessment of Segalen's own writings, and particularly in their recent recontextualization in a postcolonial frame.

As such, what follows provides a reflection on the formation of communities of thought in which intellectuals from different moments and different ideological niches — in this case distinctively (and not unproblematically) colonial and postcolonial — are drawn into dialogue in ways that appear achronological. For, as products of very different sets of geographical, historical and political circumstances, and as writers associated respectively with colonial and postcolonial literature and thought, Segalen and Glissant nevertheless may be seen to belong to an eclectic community of ‘Francophone postcolonial intellectuals’.⁵ They can also be identified as part of a wider community of French-language writers — including figures such as Montesquieu — whose relationship to otherness is characterized by an ability, in Sidi Omar Azeroual's terms, to ‘adopter une stratégie de discours avec au lieu d'instaurer un discours sur’⁶ (adopt a strategy of discoursing with instead of establishing a discourse about). The article falls into two main sections, the first of which explores the ways Segalen and Glissant's reflections on questions of contact and cultural diversity overlap, intersect and ultimately interact; the second section draws on the work of Celia Britton, the first to comment in detail on the links between Glissant and postcolonial theory, in order to focus more specifically on the ways in which this interaction contributes in particular to the development of thought in the postcolonial field.

Victor Segalen and Édouard Glissant — through their attention, in very different contexts and at very different historical moments, to intercultural dynamics and the persistence of diversity — were both ‘confronted with the tragic degradation of the human’.⁷ Together, their work has generated (or, at the least, been deployed to illuminate) some of the key terms and concepts that have shaped postcolonial studies and (perhaps more importantly) have delineated the French and Francophone contours of a field understood, initially at least, as a primarily Anglophone one. In this context, the relationship between the pair is not to be understood, as Jean-Louis Cornille has implied it might be, as one of unidirectional plagiarism by a living author of a dead one.⁸ Instead, it constitutes a more complex process of mutual illumination (what Cornille himself suggests might be seen as ‘métissage littéraire’ (MC, 173) (literary hybridization)) whereby the anti-colonial and postcolonial writer Glissant elaborates his own thinking iteratively via the detour of reading and re-reading an œuvre that emerged from the context of high imperialism. In this process of elaboration of new thinking around Segalen's work, Glissant contributes to the discernment of meaning in a largely forgotten body of writing largely incomprehensible to those contemporary to its production. Kenneth White has suggested that the disruptive potential of Segalen's work resides in ‘l'actualité de l'inactualité’⁹ (the topicality of the lack of topicality) that it reveals, and it is, in large part, through Glissant's evolving and heuristic engagement with texts such as Stèles and the Essai sur l'exotisme that this early twentieth-century reflection on exoticism and cultural diversity has found a new readership in the context of decolonization and, more recently, of contemporary globalization and postcoloniality.

In his eulogy for Édouard Glissant delivered at l'Anse Caffard and published in February 2011, Patrick Chamoiseau identified Segalen — dubbed ‘ce bon Segalen qui déchiffre l'errance’ (good Segalen who deciphered wandering) — as one of the cluster of key artists and thinkers with whom the recently deceased Martinican intellectual had engaged throughout his whole adult life.¹⁰ Segalen is associated in Chamoiseau's designation with a key concept in Glissant's work, that of ‘wandering’ — and, more specifically, with the ‘wanderer’. This is a figure described by Celia Britton in Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory as one who ‘explores the world, aspires to know it in its totality, but realizes that he never will’, and also for whom this ultimate unknowability reveals the ‘infinitely open-ended, uncontainable aspect of Relation’.¹¹ As Chamoiseau suggests, Segalen serves as a constant point of reference in Glissant's work. This process began with the early engagement in the 1950s, when Glissant produced a review essay originally and enthusiastically entitled ‘Segalen, Segalen!’ in Les Lettres nouvelles (subsequently included in L'Intention poétique).¹² At the same time, he also factored lexical indications of Segalenian influence into his early poetry (Le Sang rivé contains references, for instance, to ‘Océanie’ and ‘sampan’; critics have detected resonances between Stèles and Les Indes).¹³ This engagement continued then through to the work of his final years, the period now associated with the ‘late Glissant’, in whose work references to the theorist and poet of exoticism continued to be prominent: Segalen is present in the collected interviews with Alexandre Leupin and Lise Gauvin that appeared with Gallimard (in 2008 and 2010 respectively);¹⁴ Quand les murs tombent, the 2007 pamphlet written with Chamoiseau as a critique of the Ministry of National Identity, acts as another stage in a dialogue with Segalenian notions of identity, diversity and the aesthetics of difference;¹⁵ and finally, extracts from Segalen's Equipée and Stèles that featured in La Terre, le feu, l'eau et les vents, subtitled as an anthologie de la poésie du Tout-Monde, a collection that appeared shortly before Glissant's death in 2010.¹⁶

The persistent presence of Segalen in Glissant's work and thought across a period of over five decades illustrates the extent to which the early twentieth-century writer has provided, throughout the century following his death in 1919, an illuminating case study in intellectual and literary afterlives and in their implications for the construction of communities of thought. At his premature death at the age of forty-one, Segalen, the poet, novelist, essayist, travel writer and naval doctor, had published only three texts: the Tahitian ethnographic novel narrating the ‘fatal impact’ of Western incursions in the Pacific, Les Immémoriaux (1907); and two collections of prose poems inspired by Chinese cultural models, Stèles (1912) and Peintures (1916). Other keys works — such as the proto-New Novel René Leys, and the unfinished Essai sur l'exotisme  — remained in manuscript, fragments of a body of work of which large parts still remain unpublished. Segalen's precocious modernity was for several decades obscured and largely ignored as a result of an interpretation that over-privileged its orientalizing, post-Symbolist dimensions. The Belgian surrealist poet Norge describes the discovery of remaindered copies of the poet's work on the stalls of bouquinistes along the Parisian quais in the 1930s,¹⁷ and it took until the end of the last century — and most notably until the publication of a largely provisional edition in two volumes of œuvres complètes by Laffont in the ‘Bouquins’ series in 1995 and the inclusion of Segalen on the agrégration programme in 1999 — for widespread critical attention to be paid.¹⁸ The intervening decades reveal nevertheless a striking process of excavation and engagement, in which Glissant was one of a number of eminent yet diverse readers who grappled with what Timothy Billings and Christopher Bush have dubbed (in their excellent English-language translation of Stèles) the ‘readerly challenges’ of Segalen's work.¹⁹ These prominent interpreters constitute a suitably diverse network, including Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard, James Clifford, Pierre Jean Jouve, Tzvetan Todorov, Michael Gilsenan, Patrick Chamoiseau and Kenneth White. In the vanguard of this select group of readers were, however, two key Francophone postcolonial authors and critics, Abdelkebir Khatibi and Glissant himself, both of whom — in the upheaval of decolonization in the 1950s — discovered in Segalen's work tools for the analysis of their own respective situations and of the immediate contexts of global transformation of which these formed a part.

Connexions between Khatibi and Glissant — beyond their evident status as Francophone postcolonial intellectuals, belonging to a generation whose thought was shaped by anti-colonial struggle and the challenges of decolonization — are not immediately apparent. Both, however, used their work to explore the complex relationship to the French language of the postcolonial writer operating in French; both also engaged closely with contemporary French philosophy and thought, proposing what might be seen in retrospect as the progressive ‘postcolonialization’ of intellectual culture emerging from the metropolitan centre; finally, as Silke Segler-Messner notes, both discerned in Segalen the roots of another kind of poetics, identifying in the process ‘the fin-de-siècle exote as the initiator of an alternative form of literary description, which explores spaces and places, and is concerned with the interstitial and a third dimension of the other’.²⁰ In this context, the actively critical consumption and reframing of Segalen by Glissant and Khatibi may be seen as a form of intellectual cannibalism, with such an analysis echoing reflections by the Brazilian modernist movement in the 1920s on cultural anthropophagy — and the ways in which imported cultural influences must be absorbed, digested and critically reconfigured in terms of the local context of its consumption.²¹ Khatibi provides a clear frame in which to understand the ways other postcolonial intellectuals such as Glissant engaged with Segalen. In an interview with Jean Scemla in 1984, Khatibi describes, for instance, his experience of reading Segalen along such lines: ‘I think we need to distance ourselves from Segalen whilst consuming him, i.e. whilst absorbing him magically.’²² The Moroccan sociologist and author had described, in La Mémoire tatouée (1971), his introduction to Segalen's Polynesian works three decades earlier by a literature teacher at the lycée français in Casablanca in the 1950s: ‘When he explained Segalen by underlining the death of cultures, I know that he was giving me weapons.’²³ Khatibi appears to refer here to Les Immémoriaux, a text that was reissued in 1955 by Jean Malaurie in Plon's ‘Terre humaine’ series, alongside Lévi-Strauss's Tristes tropiques (a work that similarly outlines the erosion of cultural distinctiveness and the entropic imposition of a global monoculture). It was his exploration of the same kinds of questions that drew Glissant to Segalen's work as — during his first stay in France — he sought to understand the implications of the persistently colonial, transatlantic axes that tied Martinique to contemporary France.

Glissant initially discovered Segalen in the 1955 ‘Club du Meilleur Livre’ edition of Stèles, Peintures, Equipée, his review of which in Les Lettres nouvelles is mentioned above. Although produced in a limited edition of 5,000, this edition provided for the first time access to Segalen's key Chinese texts, and also, perhaps more importantly, included extensive extracts from the Notes sur l'exotisme, the fragmented manuscript of the essay on exoticism that had previously only appeared in a heavily abridged form several years earlier in the Mercure de France.²⁴ Jean-Louis Cornille has captured the impact of this textual encounter — occurring, almost certainly, ‘without any prior knowledge’ — on the young Glissant: ‘to judge by the lasting impact that this work had on him, it must have been a real revelation to read it out of the blue, while he was in the midst of this own writing’ (MC, 176); and Jean-Pol Madou similarly describes an ‘overwhelming revelation’.²⁵ The initial discovery of Segalen outlined not least for Glissant an investigative literary form, based on the essay, that he would deploy for much of the rest of his career, most notably in the cycle of texts subtitled ‘poétique’. This is a provisional, evolving genre in Glissant's work, described in the interviews with Lise Gauvin as ‘a tool of discovery’ that permitted its author to ‘delve into a matter’ (ELG, 74); as Jean-Pol Madou comments, the intellectual practices encapsulated in the Segalenian équipée are closely linked to those of the Glissantian drive (LGS, 73),²⁶ but at the same time, Glissant moves beyond form to discover in Segalen key terms and concepts that he would use as foils to develop his own emerging understanding of cultural distinctiveness and diversity. Traces of this engagement with Segalen are already evident in Soleil de la conscience in 1956, not least in the anti-entropic, anti-colonial observation that: ‘there will be no culture without all cultures, no other civilization that can be the metropolis of others’.²⁷ Such a claim — a decade after departmentalization in the French Caribbean — was firmly grounded in a clear understanding of the subjectivity of the colonized and in a clear reassertion of the relativity and the bilateral nature of the exotic gaze as expressed in L'Intention poétique: ‘You say overseas (we have said it with you), but you are also soon overseas’ (IP, 21). Echoing the sense of a pivotal reversal of the gaze encapsulated in the observation in the Essai sur l'exotisme (‘the familiar “tu” will dominate’) (EE, 17), Glissant appears to draw from Segalen a precociously early understanding of exoticism that presents the concept not reductively or schematically (that is, not as ‘entirely negative or entirely exhilarating’ (ELG, 17)), but as variable and even volatile. Central to this engagement with Segalen is this recognition that terms evolve and that concepts travel, with the result that there is a meticulous job of contextualization required to understand how a word such as ‘le Divers’ migrates from an early twentieth-century use in a text such as the Essai sur l'exotisme to later, postcolonial variations on the term in the work of Glissant.

Poems from Stèles selected for the Tout-Monde anthology published in 2010 (a year before its editor's death) encapsulate the Segalenian exoticism with which Glissant engages across his work. In ‘Conseils au bon voyageur’, for instance, Segalen praises the permanent alternation implicit in the changing landscapes of travel, linking this to the ‘the intoxicating eddies of the great river Diversity’; and in ‘Nom caché’, he challenges the Western privileging of knowledge, and gestures towards the power of identifying a place of opacity beyond comprehension, underlining a radical commitment to what Glissant would dub the ‘right to opacity’: ‘may the devastating torrent come rather than Knowledge’.²⁸ Yvonne Hsieh notes that — in focusing on the key terms evident in these texts such as ‘diversity’ and ‘opacity’ — ‘none has contributed as much as Glissant to the consecration of Segalen as a precursor of postcolonial thinking’,²⁹ and it is true that the Martinican thinker appears to discern in works such as the Essai sur l'exotisme precursory concepts and embryonic debates foreshadowing phenomena that would emerge as central to postcolonialism and to considerations of postcoloniality, and might be seen as essential to a distinctively French and Francophone contribution to those fields.

As Marc Gontard comments, Segalen's association of intercultural contact with the ‘imprévisible’ (unpredictable) — a term particularly evident in Equipée, the hybrid travel narrative in which the aesthetics of diversity are sketched out and illustrated in the field — is key to understanding the distinction between Glissantian ‘créolisation’ and a more biological and predetermined process of ‘métissage’ (or at least between what Gontard sees as ‘métissage acculturant’ (acculturating hybridization) and ‘métissage créolisant’ (creolizing hybridization)).³⁰ Glissant notes: ‘creolization is unpredictable whereas you could calculate the effects of hybridization’ (IPD, 19), pointing towards the possibility in a period of globalization of the residually neguentropic cultural distinctiveness that Segalen himself sought in the texts produced in the final few years of his life when he identified discontinuity within apparent entropic continuity: ‘new partitions and unforeseen lacunae, a system of very fine filigree striated through the fields that one initially perceived as an unbroken space’ (EE, 57–8). In literary and linguistic terms, this observation is particularly evident in the recognition and celebration of multilingualism, that is in the ‘mise en réseau’ (networking) of languages to which Glissant alludes in Introduction à une poétique du Divers, and of which Stèles is a particularly striking example (IPD, 122). For Glissant, retention of diversity depends on recognition of what Silke Segler-Messner dubs ‘multilingualism as the foundation of every form of writing’, and it is in Segalen's work that he discovers a clear example of such a post-monolingual poetics that permits scrutiny from a postcolonial perspective of language use.³¹

When Celia Britton's Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory appeared in 1999, resistance in the French-speaking world to what is often perceived as the Anglo-Saxon import of postcolonial theory had been longstanding. This resistance should not, of course, be singularized, for it ranged from hostility towards approaches to literature viewed as anti-universalist, moving via a sense that postcolonialism had merely recreated critical practices long evident in France (in works such as Bernard Mouralis's Les Contre-littératures (1975)), to a wholly justified frustration that critical models generated outside the Francosphere were inadequate to understandings of the French-speaking world.³² Jean-Marc Moura's Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale (published by PUF in the same year as Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory) represented a notable exception in its effort to analyse the potential contribution of postcolonial theory to readings of Francophone literature.³³ However, whereas Moura's work tends to cast postcolonial literature in French as a passive recipient of work originating in the Anglophone academy, Celia Britton's sustained and rigorous study of Glissant stressed the potentially active contribution of Francophone writing from the Caribbean to postcolonial theory itself. As such, it represented a most timely intervention, not least because it formed part of a diverse cluster of texts — including other studies, such as Peter Hallward's Absolutely Postcolonial (2001)³⁴ — that challenged the monolingual impasse into which postcolonialism risked retreating around the turn of the century: on the one hand, Britton revealed the substantial insights offered by the body of Glissantian work, theoretical and fictional, as the field of French studies was slowly ‘postcolonialized’; on the other, she underlined the then restricted nature of postcolonial criticism and the need to open this up to a wider range of references from different cultural and linguistic traditions beyond those regularly recycled.

Britton began her study by identifying in Glissant's work a terminological coherence; previous English-language critics and translators had tended to rely on a less stable range of terms. She argued that if Glissant were to be validated and recognized as a postcolonial theorist in his own right and his thought integrated into more widespread reflections on postcoloniality, then concepts central to his work, those of ‘Relation’, ‘essence’, ‘opacity’, and ‘detour’, should be granted wider resonance. As the title suggested, Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory situated its subject for the first time in relation to postcolonialism, and explored the overlap of its subject's work with that of Fanon, Said, Bhabha, Spivak and the other then prominent theorists of postcolonialism, stressing the ways in which the Martinican intellectual inhabited a similar if not entirely identical intellectual world as them. However, in Britton's study, Glissant's specificity is constantly stressed, and there is no easy conflation of radically different cultural or political situations, no attempt, for instance, to overlay Spivak's Indian subcontinent on Glissant's Martinique. As a result, it is the divergences rather than the similarities on which Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory focuses, on the slippage between, for example, Fanon's and Glissant's approaches to delirium and madness. The study unfolds subtly, interweaving theoretical considerations with fresh and original readings of Glissant's novels. As is suggested above, Glissant's work privileges in particular the role of language as a key element of postcolonial experience. Fictional texts, as working models of counterpoetics, are seen to illustrate strategies of resistance.³⁵

Britton underlined the conceptual coherence of Glissant's work, by 1999 an œuvre already spanning a period of almost fifty years. His novels and essays in particular are seen to constitute a unified struggle to forge new modes of expression whose implications ultimately transcend the particular situation of Martinique and also of the French Caribbean more generally. The final chapter, drawing on Glissant's work from the 1990s, accordingly outlined a new world-view, rooted in the Caribbean but based on an understanding of the distinctively Segalenian concepts of diversity and unpredictability whose wider implications for a postcolonial grasp of language and identity were then only slowly emerging. In the opening chapter of Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory, ‘Concepts of Resistance’, Britton acknowledges the formative role of Segalen in her subject's thought. The Breton author (as discussed by Glissant in L'Intention poétique) is read in the light of Spivak's work. His ‘wish [evident in some of the early, Polynesian texts] to lose himself in a completely alien culture’ is seen, however, as a form of bad faith — that is, in Britton's terms, ‘the fantasy of absolute otherness absolves him of the responsibility of examining his position in relation to it — of becoming aware of his own positionality as investigative subject’ (EGPT, 17). ‘Relation’ and ‘opacité’ are seen as alternative mechanisms adopted by Glissant to safeguard the other's difference and avoid the assimilative extremes of exoticism. (Such extremes are reflected in the spectrum described in Lire l'exotisme by Jean-Marc Moura, a spectrum that ranges, at one extreme, from absorption or assimilation of otherness to, at the other, the loss of self.³⁶) In Britton's formulation: ‘just as I cannot reduce the Other to my norms, nor conversely can I become the Other, in the kind of exoticizing identification that Glissant attributes to Segalen (of whom he writes [in Poétique de la Relation] that “personally I believe he died of the Other's opacity”)’ (EGPT, 19).

Although the references to Segalen in Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory are restricted to these two occasions, what emerges from these is a very clear sense — in the frame of postcolonial theory — of the ambiguous nature of Glissant's dialogue with this interlocutor. The rapport between Glissant and Segalen is seen as deeply formative in the ways outlined above, yet is at the same time characterized by a dialectical process of self-differentiation as the Martinican thinker progressively distanced himself from the work of the earlier twentieth-century naval doctor and precocious theorist of the exotic. (Jean-Louis Joubert eloquently describes Glissant's relationship to Segalen as that of a ‘critical reader of [his] works and sometimes [his] heir, natural or paradoxical’.³⁷) It is undeniable, for instance, that ‘relation’ and ‘opacité’, despite their clear distinctiveness and their specific point of genesis in a Caribbean context, owe much to Segalenian concepts such as ‘le Divers’ (Diversity), ‘l'impénétrabilité’ (impenetrability) and ‘incompréhensibilité éternelle’ (eternal incomprehensibility), as set out in the essay on exoticism. Such a debt is made particularly clear, from the title itself even, in the 1996 volume Introduction à une poétique du Divers, where Glissant writes: ‘Honour and respect to Segalen. He was the first to raise the issue of diversity in the world, to fight exoticism as a complacent form of colonization, and he was a doctor on a military vessel’ (IPD, 76–7). Segalen's early twentieth-century analysis of the decline of cultural difference — ‘Diversity is in decline. Therein lies the great earthly threat. It is therefore against this decay that we must fight, fight amongst ourselves — perhaps die with beauty’ (EE, 63) — resonates with Glissant's critique of assimilation in the post-departmentalized Caribbean. Segalen had also firmly, and somewhat surprisingly, been associated by Glissant in the 1950s with struggles for decolonization: ‘There are innumerable people suffering and dying today for their Difference to be acknowledged, so that Diversity can emerge again in reality. Perhaps he would have allied himself to them, or supported their struggle’ (IP, 101–2).

There is, however, a clear shift. Glissant's later readings become more nuanced, and Segalen is presented in Le Discours antillais as ‘le partagé’ (the divided one), an enlightened thinker who to an extent transcends the constraints of his early twentieth-century context, engages differently with otherness, but cannot entirely escape the dilemmas of his contemporary socio-political circumstances. In the terms already evident in L'Intention poétique, Glissant notes: ‘il n’était pas de Pékin mais de Brest, et non pas Chinois du Vieil Empire mais Français du début de ce siècle’³⁸ (he was not from Beijing but from Brest, and not Chinese of the Old Empire but French from the beginning of this century). Nevertheless, this is not a rejection of Segalen, but rather an assertion of his ambiguously precursory status, ‘en avant du monde’ (ahead of the world) — that is, as one of the ‘premiers poètes de la Relation’ (first poets of Relating), emblematic of the modernist trajectory from centre to periphery, yet excluded from the radical decentred-ness of ‘Relation’, distanced from the creolization that the ultimate essentialism of Segalenian diversity belies, from the systems of plurality and hybridity that Segalen could perhaps not imagine. In a discussion of Segalen and Saint-John Perse, Glissant points even in the life and work of the former to a dislocation between poetic aspirations and a lived context in which such aspirations remains largely unthinkable: ‘I myself believe that he died of the opacity of the Other, of the impossibility he had discovered of perfecting the transmutation of which he dreamed.’³⁹

In refusing to simplify Segalen, and in accordingly facing the inherent contradictions of his work, Glissant proposes an investigation of the aesthetics of diversity that is simultaneously historical and actual. He examines the colonial context in which it is mired (a dimension distinctly missing from the postmodern interpretations of a reader such as Baudrillard), but also understands the postcolonial context in which it has come to prominence. Glissant's engagement with Segalen is, therefore, not so much an extension or a completion of works such as the Essai sur l'exotisme — a text which, as Cornille notes, ‘[i]n its fundamental incompleteness (…) only asked to be continued’ (MC, 172) — as their recasting, translation and re-interpretation in a contemporary frame.

Celia Britton describes the task of the postcolonial critic as levering open the ideological closures of dominant discourses, locating moments of fracture, and ‘uncover[ing] the subject-position assigned to the subaltern in the text [and showing] how this may involve deconstructing a Western logic of representation and self-representation’ (EGPT, 57). This is a concise definition of one of the principal aims of postcolonial theory itself, and one to which Glissant, in his literary, philosophical and political writings, contributed greatly. The conclusion to Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory signals Glissant's critical and theoretical engagement with what Britton calls ‘the monolithic hegemony of “sameness” ’, describing the ways in which contemporary recognition of chaos, creolization, the rhizome, archipélisation and the Tout-Monde betoken the end of ‘old, singular system[s] of domination’ and the emergence of ‘a world view based on diversity and unpredictability’ (EGPT, 179). In understanding the genealogy of Glissant's thought — and, it might be suggested, of postcolonial thought more generally — identifying the constructive yet ultimately ambivalent role of Segalen continues to be key. The sense of a community of thinkers that such dialoguing may be seen to assemble is not, however, to be understood either in terms of descent and influence, or of genealogies and sequentially linear connexions. To borrow from a distinction proposed by the anthropologist Tim Ingold, it is perhaps more helpfully interpreted (and here in actively Glissantian terms) as ‘relational’ more than in terms of ‘relatedness’, for such a ‘relational’ approach challenges notions of chronological precedence and reveals the ways in which the work of a thinker and creator such as Segalen can be grasped more dynamically, beyond the immediate temporal and ideological niche from which it emerged.⁴⁰

Ingold explores questions of cultural and biological ancestry, drawing not on Glissant but on Deleuze and Guattari (whose role in Glissant's thought is well recorded) in order to replace conventional genealogical models with a rhizomatic alternative, ‘a dense and tangled cluster of interlaced threads or filaments, any point in which can be pointed to any other’ (PE, 140). This anti-genealogy leads to a ‘progenerative’ model that — if applied to intellectual communities — challenges quasi-biological ideas of descent as well as the anxieties of influence that these may betoken (and that are often evident in accounts of Francophone Caribbean thought). Instead, it permits the acknowledgement of different, relational understandings within the evolution of an interrelated body of thinking, ‘the continual unfolding of an entire field of relationships’ (PE, 142). As such, challenging the reductive causality of reception and influence permits a more fluid understanding of cross-generational, even transhistorical dialogues. It underlines — in the case of Segalen and Glissant — not only the role of the work of the former in the elaboration of the conceptual apparatus of the latter, but also the heuristic value of such re-engagement in recontextualizing and illuminating meanings previously obscured.

In the light of such a reading, Cornille's identification of Segalen as the ‘theoretical zombie of Glissantian discourse’, and his associated re-statement on the part of Glissant of an anxiety of influence (MC, 174, 173), seem overegged and ultimately unfounded. Cornille's insistent identification of Segalen as a ‘présence incontournable’ (unavoidable presence) in Glissant's work — ‘eventually exasperating, we sense, as there is no way to express anything that has not been proposed by his predecessor’ — fails to acknowledge that more complex processes are at play. Marc Gontard provides a much clearer sense of what is at stake in Segalen's absorption in contemporary Francophone Caribbean thought. Including in his discussion of this network the Créolistes, who have been similarly attentive to Segalen's work (Chamoiseau includes the Essai sur l'exotisme in his sentimentèque, and most probably encountered this work via Glissant), Gontard notes:

To present the intellectual work encapsulated in the encounter of Glissant and Segalen in such progenerative terms is also to provide a further (and, in the case of a Caribbean thinker such as Glissant, highly suggestive) gloss to Edward Said's reflections on the secular critics. A figure such as Glissant is located as a result firmly and constructively between processes of ‘filiation’ (in which intellectuals are linked closely to a place of origin ‘by birth, nationality, profession’) and of ‘affiliation’ (in which critics seeks new alliances and allegiances ‘by social and political conviction, economic and historical circumstances, voluntary effort and willed deliberation’).⁴²

These relationships, bridging the gap between ‘filiation’ (connexions within the Caribbean and the wider Americas) and ‘affiliation’ (encapsulated by mature Glissantian concepts such as the ‘Tout-Monde’) are illustrated and exemplified by Glissant's dynamic and evolving engagement with Segalen. This encounter may at the same time be seen as generative of alternative modes of thinking such as Antillanité (Caribbeanness), and as key to understanding the Martinican thinker's complex negotiation of his own location between the historical Négritude of Aimé Césaire and the Créolité of the generation that followed him. Therefore, the significant rendezvous between Segalen and Glissant is not — to return to James Clifford's terms, to which I alluded at the opening of this article — so much manqué, as indirect and prolonged; it provides a compelling illustration of Khatibi's model of critical distancing and interpretative absorption, and also of Borges's understanding of reading as a process of progressive and repeated engagement accompanied by evolving comprehension.⁴³