The Case for Incomprehension

Item

Titre
The Case for Incomprehension
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy
Titre du volume
1
Volume
23
Date
2015/08/05
Langue(s)
Anglais
Issn
2155-1162
Libre de droits
Copyright (c) 2015 Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy
Résumé
I argue that Glissant conceived of opacity first and foremost in his poetry and in his readings of earlier writers, from Mallarmé to Saint-John Perse to William Faulkner, whose moments of complication or incomprehensibility he found productive. By examining the literary valence of this concept of Caribbean philosophy, I claim that opacity not only protects the subject from the invasive grasp of (neo)colonial thought but also, more affirmatively, invites the reader to join the poet on equal footing in the process of sense-making. It is this kind of collective poetics, a collectivity created in opacity, that Glissant imagines in his broader world vision of Relation and the Tout-Monde.
Creator
Neal Allar
Subject
Caribbean
Glissant
nettoyé
opacity
postcolonial
pages
43-58
doi
10.5195/jffp.2015.680