1/4/2023 0 Comments Edouard glissantAccording to his Poetics of Relation, literature, as a medium, is best designed to foster a communication characterized by opacity. It has to be pointed out, though, that ethics and aesthetics are intertwined in Glissant’s writing, so that his essays cannot be reduced to political claims alone (cf. Therefore, it is often understood as a form of postcolonial resistance against domination (cf. The author makes clear that the right to opacity is an ethical and political claim. It reflects on uncontrollable “confluences” and an increasing intermingling of diversities, both of which oppose monolithic worldviews. Opacity, instead, offers a de-hierarchized world-vision as well as a discourse complementary to universal or systemic approaches to globalization. Within this framework, Glissant challenges the rational epistemic of Enlightenment and its assumption of universal truths by calling into question the etymological meaning of ‘comprehension’ (com-prendere) as an act of appropriation. Opacity thus tries to overcome the risk of reducing, normalizing and even assimilating the singularities of cultural differences by comprehension. In a multirelational world, recognizing difference does not mean understanding otherness by making it transparent, but accepting the unintelligibility, impenetrability and confusion that often characterize cross-cultural communication. As an antonym of transparency, this notion questions the possibilities of intercultural communication. The “right to opacity” (le droit à l’opacité) constitutes an important part of Glissant’s poetics of relation. In Poétique de la Relation (Poetics of Relation, 1990/2006) he develops a vision of a transcultural world determined by transversal movements and heterogeneous realities that altogether shape a “chaos-world” (chaos-monde) of unforeseen and unsystematic relations (see also: Introduction à une poétique du divers – Introduction to a poetics of diversity, 2006). Best known for his concepts antillanité (1981) and creolisation (1990), both of which focus on cultural hybridity in the Caribbean, Glissant has also had an impact on the theoretical discussions about globalization and the ongoing process of cultural diversification and cross-cultural encounters. During the last decades, his voice has gained wide recognition in the fields of Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies and World Literature (Apter 2013 Arndt 2009 Nesbitt 2013). Opacité/Opacity is a concept developed by the Francophone writer Édouard Glissant from Martinique.
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