Edouard Glissant Quotes on Knowledge
Édouard Glissant (1928–2011), the Martinican poet and theorist whose Caribbean Discourse (1981), Poetics of Relation (1990), and the late Treatise on the Whole-World (1997) gave Francophone postcolonial thought its most ambitious philosophical articulation, defended the doctrine of opacity (opacité) against the demand that the colonized other be transparent to the cognitive categories of the metropolitan observer. The framework treats genuine cross-cultural knowledge as the work of Relation — the productive contact between cultures whose creolization rather than assimilation is the proper outcome — and the parallel Whole-World (Tout-Monde) supplies the corresponding planetary horizon within which such relation is to be conceived.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Edouard Glissant:
“I write to you from a place where the world has always already been creolized.”
-
“beginning of Mahagony (1987 novel), translated from the French into English by Betsy Wing (2001)”
Trees that live a long time exude mystery and magic. As if they were creating strong potions of happiness and calamity in their ripe old age, stirring together heaven and animal nature, and using these mixtures to control us and come to our aid. An herb's magic is perishable; a potion made from it can only work on bodies, be useful for love or for doing harm to others. But a tree, though more rese -
“beginning of Chapter 1”
All this wind," said Papa Longoué, "all this wind about to come up, nothing you can do, you wait for it to come up to your hands, then your mouth, your eyes, your head. As if a man was only there to wait for the wind, to drown, yes, you understand, to drown himself for good in all this wind like the endless ocean..." -And one can't say, he went on thinking (on his haunches in front of the child), -
“Our intention in this work was to pull together all levels of experience . This piling-up is the most suitable technique for exposing a reality that is itself being scattered. Its evolution is like a repetition of a few obsessions that take root , tied to realities that keep slipping away . The intellectual journey is destined to have a geographical itinerary, through which the "intention" within the Discourse explores its space and into which it is woven.”
beginning of Introduction: From this discourse on a discourse -
“beginning of Introduction: From this discourse on a discourse”
Our intention in this work was to pull together all levels of experience . This piling-up is the most suitable technique for exposing a reality that is itself being scattered. Its evolution is like a repetition of a few obsessions that take root , tied to realities that keep slipping away . The intellectual journey is destined to have a geographical itinerary, through which the "intention" within -
“Sameness is sublimated difference; Diversity is accepted difference. ("National Literatures")”
Wikiquote -
“To move from the oral to the written is to immobilise the body, to take control (to possess it). ("Poetics")”
Wikiquote