Édouard Glissant

Treatise on
the Whole-World

translated by
Celia Britton

LI V ER POOL U N I V ER SITY PR ESS

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 A Timeline for Édouard Glissant
A Timeline for Édouard Glissant

21 September 1928 Édouard Godard is born in the Morne Bezaudin,

Martinique.
1935–1939 Primary school, Le Lamentin, Martinique.
1938 Édouard Godard is recognized by his father and
becomes Édouard Glissant.
1939–1945 High school.
1944 Glissant founds and directs a journal, Franc Jeu.
1946 He leaves Martinique to study ethnology and
philosophy (under the philosopher Jean Wahl) in
France, at the Université de la Sorbonne.
1948 Publication of Glissant’s first poems in the journal
Les temps modernes, founded by Jean-Paul Sartre
and Simone de Beauvoir.
1950 Glissant marries Yvonne Suvélor in Paris. He
collaborates with the journal Présence africaine.
1952 He receives a Master of Arts in Philosophy. His
thesis, under Gaston Bachelard’s direction, is
entiled Découverte et conception du monde dans la
poésie contemporaine.
1953 Glissant contributes to the journal Les Lettres
nouvelles, founded by Maurice Nadeau and
Maurice Saillet.
Un champ d’îles (poems) (Paris, Instance).
1955 La terre inquiète (poems) (Paris, éditions du
Dragon).
1956 Les Indes (poem) (Paris, Le Seuil).
Soleil de la conscience, Poétique I (essays) (Paris, Le
Seuil).
Glissant participates in the first congress of black
writers and artists in Paris.
1958 La Lézarde (novel) (Paris, Le Seuil), which receives
the Théophraste Renaudot Prize.
1959 Glissant participates in the second congress of
black writers and artists in Rome.
1960 Le sel noir (poems) (Paris, Le Seuil).
Glissant participates in the FAGA (Front Antillo-
Guyanais pour l’Autonomie).
He signs the Manifeste des 121 or Declaration on
the right of insubordination in the Algerian War.
1961 Le sang rivé (poems) (Paris, Le Seuil).
Visit to Cuba. Glissant is forbidden to stay in
Martinique and assigned to reside in Metropolitan
France, as one of the leaders of Antillean
separatism.
1964 Le Quatrième Siècle (novel) (Paris, Le Seuil).
Glissant marries Jacqueline Marie Amélie Hospice
in Paris.
1965 Glissant is allowed to return to Martinique.
1967 He creates the Institut Martiniquais d’Études
(IME), a private school, where many artists and
writers will be taught.
1969 L’Intention poétique, Poétique II (essays) (Paris, Le
Seuil).
1971 Glissant founds the journal Acoma, hosted by the
Parisian publisher Maspéro.
1975 Malemort (novel), (Paris, Le Seuil).
1978 Monsieur Toussaint (theatre play) (Paris, Le Seuil).
1979 Boises (poems) (éditions Acoma, Martinique).
1980 He defends his PhD in sociology at the Sorbonne
University with summa cum laude.
1981 Le Discours antillais (essay) (Paris, Le Seuil), based
on his PhD.
La case du commandeur (novel) (Paris, Le Seuil).
1982–1988 Director of the Courrier de l’Unesco.
Glissant meets Sylvie Sémavoine.
1985 Pays rêvé, pays réel (poems) (Paris, Le Seuil).
1987 Mahogany (novel) (Paris, Le Seuil).
1988 Glissant is named distinguished professor and
director of the Center for French and Francophone
Studies at Louisiana State University.
1989 Doctor honoris causa from the Collège universitaire
de Glendon, University of York, Canada.
Wins the Puterbaugh Prize and lectures at the
University of Oklahoma, Norman, under the aegis
of World Literature Today.
1990 Glissant moves from Le Seuil to Gallimard.
Poétique de la Relation, Poétique III (essay) (Paris,
Gallimard).
Discours de Glendon (essay) (Toronto, editions du
GREF).
Director of the Caribbean Carbet Prize.
1991 Fastes (poems) (Toronto, éditions du GREF).
1993 Tout-Monde (novel) (Paris, Gallimard).
Glissant is named honorary president of the
International Parliament of Writers (Paris), of
which he was one of the founding members.
He is named doctor honoris causa by the University
of the West Indies, first in Trinidad, then in
Jamaica.
1994 He is named distinguished professor at the City
University of New York Graduate Center.
Les Grands Chaos (poems) (Gallimard, Paris).
1996 Faulkner, Mississippi (essay) (Paris Stock).
Poèmes complets, Introduction à une poétique du
divers (essay) (Gallimard, Paris).
1997 Traité du Tout-Monde, Poétique IV (Paris,
Gallimard).
1998 Glissant marries Sylvie Sémavoine in New Jersey.
1999 Sartorius. Le roman des Batoutos (novel) (Paris,
Gallimard).
2000 Le Monde incréé, poétrie (theatre) (Paris,
Gallimard), which includes three plays:
Conte de ce que fut la tragédie d’Askia (1963)
Parabole d’un moulin de la Martinique (1975)
La Folie Celat (1987).
2002 Creation of the Édouard Glissant Prize at the
University of Paris-VIII (Vincennes) in collabo-
ration with La maison de l’Amérique latine and,
later, the Institut du Tout-Monde.
2003 Ormerod (novel) (Paris, Gallimard).
2004 Glissant is named doctor honoris causa by the
University of Bologna, Italy.
2005 La Cohée du Lamentin, Poétique V (essay) (Paris,
Gallimard).
2006 Une nouvelle région du monde, Esthétique I (essay)
(Paris, Gallimard).
Glissant founds the Institut du Tout-Monde in
Paris.
The French president Jacques Chirac asks for his
participation in the founding of a National Center
of Slavery.
2007 La Terre magnétique, les errances de Rapa Nui, l’île
de Pâques (with Sylvie Séma) (Paris, Le Seuil).
Mémoires des esclavages (Paris, Gallimard).
Quand les murs tombent. L’identité nationale hors-
la-loi? (pamphlet) with Patrick Chamoiseau (Paris,
Galaade).
2008 Les Entretiens de Baton Rouge, interviews with
Alexandre Leupin (Paris, Gallimard).
2009 Philosophie de la Relation, Paris, Gallimard.
L’intraitable beauté du monde, adresse à Barack
Obama (pamphlet) (Paris, Galaade).
Manifeste pour les produits de haute nécessité
(pamphlet) (Paris, Galaade).
2010 Philosophie de la Relation, poésie en étendue (essay),
Paris Gallimard.
10 mai. Mémoires de la traite négrière, de l’esclavage
et de leurs abolitions (essay) (Paris, Galaade).
La terre, le feu, l’Eau et les Vents, une anthologie de
la poésie du Tout-Monde (poetry) (Paris, Galaade).
L’imaginaire des langues, interviews with Lise
Gauvin (Paris, Gallimard).
3 February 2011 Death in Paris.
2015 Glissant’s archives are declared a national treasure
by the French government and transferred to the
National French Library (BNF).

Timeline established with the help of Professors Jean-Pierre Sainton and

Raphaël Lauro.
 Contents
Contents

Translator’s Introduction 1
The Gardens in the Sands 5
The Cry of the World 7
Repetitions 21
Treatise on the Whole-World by Mathieu Béluse 27
Book 1 27
Book 2 33
Book 3 40
Waves and Backwashes 45
The Time of the Other 55
Writing 73
What Was Us, What Is Us 77
Punctuations 111
Objections to this ‘Treatise’ by Mathieu Béluse, and Reply 129
Measure, Immeasurability 137
The Town, Refuge for the Voices of the World 153
 Translator’s Introduction
Translator’s Introduction

Édouard Glissant was not only a thinker but also a novelist and poet, and
the essays in Treatise on the Whole-World reflect this; not only do characters
from the novels appear from time to time (and indeed the Treatise itself is
presented as written by a fictional character), but much of the writing has
a poetic quality that is quite different from the conventional style of the
essay (as Glissant says: ‘the poetics that have appeared in the world are gaily
reinventing the genres, unrestrainedly mixing them up’, p. 75). The book
also contains two actual poems (pp. 138–9, p. 152). He invents new words
whose meaning is not always clearly defined, and abstract discussion alter-
nates with lyrical evocations of landscapes, cities or people (‘You ask why
I am jumping about like this, going from polished sentences to all kinds
of jumbles of words?’, p. 40). Repetition, also, has a positive rather than a
negative value, because it is never exact: looking at the same idea from a
slightly different angle can shed new light on it.
The fabric of the text thus echoes its core meaning: namely, the value
it accords to diversity. This in itself of course is hardly original – although
it was more so in the context of the French republican ideology in which
Glissant was working – but he extends it far beyond the usual conventions
of multiculturalism. Difference goes together with Relation, one of his
main concepts, which he always capitalizes: all social groups, and indeed
individuals, exist in Relation with other, different, groups. This is particu-
larly true of the modern world, in which colonization and immigration have
brought together in one place extremely different cultures and lifestyles.
Universal or absolute values, and any kind of homogenization, are to be
rejected. ‘Creolization’ is a key term here, and a key positive value: Glissant
generalizes it from its usual designation of the racially mixed societies of
the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean to any society in which different
groups interact. Thus he distinguishes between ‘atavistic’ and ‘composite’,
or creolized, cultures. The interaction associated with the latter produces
new and constantly evolving, unpredictable configurations.
2 Treatise on the Whole-World

Unpredictability in general is, in his view, a major characteristic of our

modern world, and one that we have to learn to accept. Similarly, he is
totally opposed to the idea of the system, with its generalizing, mechanical
predictability. He contrasts the system with what he calls the ‘trace’: a
‘wandering that guides us’ (p. 2) and is both a path that we can follow and
the trace, in the conventional sense, that people leave behind of their culture.
The notion of place is important to the book as a whole. ‘Place is crucial’,
as he says several times (e.g. p. 37); we are formed by the place that we live
in. He reinvents the derogatory notion of the ‘common-place’ as a positive
‘common place’, i.e. a place that we have in common. But he also constructs
an important and non-conflictual relation between the specificity of the
place that one lives in and the world in general. This is the ‘Whole-World’,
which is the world subjectively experienced in terms of relationality: as he
says,

I call the Whole-World our universe as it changes and lives on through its
exchanges and, at the same time, the ‘vision’ that we have of it. The world-
totality in its physical diversity and in the representations that it inspires
in us: so that we are no longer able to sing, speak or work based on our
place alone, without plunging into the imagination of this totality (p. 108)

(This is the exact opposite of globalization, which is seen in entirely negative

terms as suppressing difference.) A kind of variation on the Whole-World
is the ‘Chaos-World’, which emphasizes not only the unpredictability of the
world but also the clashes of different cultures.
All of this also impacts on our conception of personal identity, where
Glissant borrows from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to
set up an opposition between the ‘root’ and the ‘rhizome’: i.e. ‘root’ identity
which is completely self-sufficient versus identity as the ‘rhizome’ that
reaches out to others and is constructed in relation to them.
A large part of the Treatise is devoted to questions of language, where
once again Glissant urges his readers to celebrate the diversity of languages
and, in particular, to protect those minority languages that are in danger of
disappearing. While using my own language, I must always be aware of the
existence of all the others: I can no longer write or speak ‘monolingually’. (It
is not clear how this difference might be perceptible to others.) The interest
in language(s) also leads to a discussion of the practice, and the virtues, of
translation (p. 20). And the theme of language also figures, of course, in the
many discussions of writers that occur in the book. Glissant was extraordi-
narily well-read, and moves fluently between major modern French writers,
 Translator’s Introduction 3

those that are far less widely known, and the ancient ‘founding’ texts of
not only European but also Asian and Arabic societies. But he is equally
fascinated by the conspicuously modern phenomena of computing and
audiovisual techniques and how these have completely re-set the relation
between oral and written modes of language.
Throughout the Treatise there is also an impassioned concern with the
world’s poor, the dispossessed and the oppressed: in many ways this is very
straightforward, but it links in with Glissant’s overall promotion of relat-
edness and diversity, and gives these a more overtly political dimension.
He is extremely scathing about multinational companies because of their
exploitation of the poor – but also because he sees them, with ‘their
circumference everywhere and their centre nowhere’ (p. 153), as the
ultimate negation of the importance of place. He also insists that culture
in general is necessarily political, and at one point argues (not entirely
convincingly, in my view) that the main political conflicts of our time are
to do with culture (p. 153). Two chapters are devoted to political figures:
Nelson Mandela and Léopold Senghor (although the latter concentrates
more on his writing than his political activities). And the section entitled
‘Martinique’ (pp. 141–5) is a very solid and detailed proposal for an
ecological project to reclaim the island, while another section is devoted to
the setting up of ‘refuge towns’ for persecuted writers (pp. 155–9).
More generally, history features prominently in the Treatise, especially
in the section devoted to the European Middle Age (pp. 56–62), where
Glissant focuses on the transition, as he sees it, from the multiplicity and
diversity of the early medieval period to the beginnings of classicism with
its emphasis on universality. But history also takes the far more personal
form of his adolescent memories of the Second World War, the privations
it imposed on the people of Martinique, and the ‘dissidents’ who clandes-
tinely left the island to fight in the Resistance (pp. 29–31). Geography,
also, is a significant theme in the frequent glorification of islands and
archipelagos as contrasted with continents, and he comments briefly on the
similarities and differences between science and artistic creation (p. 133).
The Treatise is thus extraordinarily wide-ranging in its subject matter,
while at the same time linking its very varied topics together through a
fairly small number of key concepts: the values of diversity and Relation
are not only proclaimed but exemplified by the text itself. It is certainly
one of the most challenging books that Glissant has written, but also one
of the most rewarding.

Celia Britton
To Olivier Glissant
For the big and the little waves
For the big and the little tunes
 • • •

The Gardens in the Sands

The Gardens in the Sands

(Theme for the essential dialogue with a poet)

The Gardens: The secret part of the poem, that solitude and grace that
the storyteller keeps for himself. The place that he offers to the intuitive
attention of She who reads omens, to the dissertations of the friend and
the brother, in a fragile sharing.

The Sands: The drunken swirling of the world’s engagements, where

everyone chants and enchants. Suffering also all sufferings. The Sands are
not infertile. They bring silence amidst all this noise round about.
 • • •

The Cry of the World

The Cry of the World

We are told, and it is true, that everything is disorganized, confused,

decrepit, madness is everywhere, the blood the wind. We see it and we
live it. But it is the whole world that is speaking to you, through so many
gagged voices.
Wherever you turn, there is desolation. But you still turn.

Doubtless we then bring to the co-operation of all knowledge, when we

make ourselves share it, what each of us has long meditated or proclaimed,
and, in my case, those few premonitions that have led me to write and
that I have constantly transcribed, or betrayed through my inadequacy, in
writing.

The thought of hybridity, of the trembling value not only of hybrid

cultures but, going further, of cultures of hybridity, which perhaps save us
from the limitations or the intolerances that lie in wait for us, and will open
up for us new spaces of relation.

The mutual impact of the techniques or the mentalities of the oral and the
written, and the inspirations that these techniques have breathed into our
traditions of writing and our outbursts of voices, gestures and cries.

The slow erosion of the absolutes of History, as the histories of peoples who
have been disarmed, dominated or sometimes are purely and simply disap-
pearing but have nevertheless burst onto the scene of our common theatre,
have finally met up and contributed to changing the whole representation
that we had of History and its system.

The more and more evident workings of what I have called creolization,
overtaking us, unpredictable, and so far away from the boring syntheses,
8 Treatise on the Whole-World

already refuted by Victor Segalen,* that a moralizing thinking would have

offered us.

The diffracted poetics of this Chaos-world that we share, on a level with and
beyond so many conflicts and obsessions with death, and whose invariants
we will have to discover.

The harmony and, just as persistent, the disharmonies that multilingualism

generates in us, this new passion for our most secret voices and rhythms.

These are some of the echoes that have now resulted in our consenting
to listen together to the cry of the world, knowing also that, as we listen,
we understand that from now on everyone can hear it.
We do not always see, and usually we try not to see, the destitution
of the world, in the forests of Rwanda and the streets of New York, in
the underground workshops of Asia where the children do not grow up
and the silent heights of the Andes, and in all the places of debasement,
degradation and prostitution, and so many others that flash before our
wide open eyes, but we cannot fail to admit that all this is making a noise,
an unstoppable murmuring that we, without realizing it, mix into the
mechanical, humdrum little tunes of our progress and our driftings.

Each one of us has his own reasons to listen to this cry, and these
different approaches serve to change this sound of the world that we all, at
the same time, hear where we are.

And these reasons, which we have seized on in the difficult passion of

writing and creating, of living and struggling, are now becoming common
places for us, that we are learning to share; but invaluable common places:
against the disorders of the identitarian machines of which we are so
often the prey, like for example the birthright, the purity of the race, the
integrality, if not the integrity, of the dogma.

* Victor Segalen (1878–1919), an important influence on Glissant, was one of

the first French thinkers to write about exoticism.
 The Cry of the World 9

Our common places, even though today they are of no use, of absolutely
no use against the concrete oppressions that stun the world, are never-
theless capable of changing the imagination* of human communities: it is
through the imagination that we will ultimately conquer these derelictions
that attack us, just as it already helps us, by shifting our sensibilities, to
fight them.

This will be my first proposition: where systems and ideologies have

failed, and without in any way giving up on the resistance or the fight that
you must carry on in your particular place, let us extend the imagination
by an infinite bursting forth and an infinite repetition of the themes of
hybridity, multilingualism and creolization.

Those who meet up here always come from an ‘over there’, from the
expanse of the world, and here they are, determined to bring to this
‘here’ the fragile knowledge that they have taken from over there. Fragile
knowledge is not imperious science. We sense that we are following a trace.

So this is my second proposition:

That the thought of the trace, as opposed to systematic thought, acts as
a wandering that guides us. We know that the trace is what puts us, all of
us, wherever we come from, in Relation.
And for some people, over there, so far so near, right here, on the hidden
face of the earth, the trace was lived as one of the places of survival. For
example, for the descendants of the Africans transported into slavery into
what would soon be called the New World, it was usually the only possible
form of action.

* In English, ‘the imaginary’ is associated primarily with its use in the work of
Lacan and Althusser, where it has a rather different meaning. I have therefore
preferred to translate ‘l’imaginaire’ here as ‘imagination’, which should be under-
stood not as the faculty of imagining but as a kind of distinctive repertoire of
images that orientate one’s thinking, in the sense in which we speak of ‘the
Romantic imagination’, ‘the Puritan imagination’, etc.
10 Treatise on the Whole-World

(A whole chunk of reality, seized from a recalcitrant past, redistributed

into every corner of life, repeated in each book:)

The trace is to the route as rebellion to the command, jubilation to the

garrotte.
Those Africans transported to the Americas carried with them, over the
Great Seas, the trace of their gods, of their customs, of their languages. Faced
with the implacable disorder of the settler, they had the genius, arising from
the suffering they endured, to make these traces fertile, creating – better than
syntheses – outcomes that no-one expected.
The Creole languages are traces, opening up across the seas of the Caribbean
or the Indian Ocean. Jazz music is a trace that has been recomposed and spread
all over the world. And all the different kinds of music of this Caribbean and
the Americas.
When these deported slaves marooned in the woods, leaving the Plantation,
the traces they followed were not those of self-abandonment or despair, but nor
were they those of pride or egotism. And they did not weigh on the new land
as irreparable stigmas.
When we – I mean the Antilleans – rush into these traces of our under-
valued histories, it is not in order to quickly outline a model of humanity that
we would then oppose, in a ready-made fashion, to those other models that are
forcibly imposed on us.
The trace is not an unfinished path where one stumbles helplessly, nor an
alley closed on itself, bordering a territory. The trace goes into the land, which
will never again be a territory. The trace is an opaque way of experiencing the
branch and the wind: of being oneself, derived from the other. It is the truly
disordered sand of utopia.
Trace thought enables us to move away from the strangulations of the system.
It thus refutes the extremes of possession. It cracks open the absolute of time. It
opens onto these diffracted times that human communities today are multiplying
among themselves, through conflicts and miracles.
It is the violent wandering of the shared thought.

(Thus for me, from cry to word, from folk tale to poem, from Soleil de
la conscience to the Poétique du divers, this same momentum.)*

* Soleil de la concience (1956) was Glissant’s first collection of essays, and

Introduction à une Poétique du divers (1996) immediately precedes the Traité du
Tout-monde.
 The Cry of the World 11

If we abandon systematic thoughts, it is because we have realized

that they have imposed, here and there, an absolute of Being, which was
profundity, magnificence, and limitation.

So many communities under threat today have only the alternatives of,
on the one hand, the tearing apart of their being, identitarian anarchy, war
between nations and dogmas, and, on the other, a Roman peace imposed
by force, an empty neutrality imposed on everything by an all-powerful,
totalitarian, well-meaning Empire.

Are we reduced to these impossible choices? Do we not have the right

and the means to live another dimension of humanity? But how?

As much as ever, masses of Negroes are threatened and oppressed

because they are Negroes, Arabs because they are Arabs, Jews because
they are Jews, Muslims because they are Muslims, Indians because they are
Indians, and so on through the infinite diversities of the world. This litany
is indeed never-ending.

The idea of identity as a single root provides the measure according

to which these communities were enslaved by others, and in the name of
which a number of them led their liberation struggles.
But could we not propose, against the single root that kills everything
around it, an extension of the root into a rhizome,* which opens up
Relation? It is not rootless: but it does not take over its surroundings.
Onto the imagination of single-root identity, let us graft this imagi-
nation of rhizome-identity.

* Glissant borrows this term from Mille Plateaux, Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari (1980).
12 Treatise on the Whole-World

Against Being, which asserts itself, let us show being, which attaches
itself.*
Let us challenge both the returns of the nationalist repressed and the
sterile universal peace of the Powerful.
In a world where so many communities find themselves mortally denied
the right to any identity, it is paradoxical to propose the imagination of an
identity-relation, an identity-rhizome. I believe however that this is indeed
one of the passions of these oppressed communities, to believe in this
moving beyond identity and to carry it along with their sufferings.
No need to bleat about a humanist vocation to understand this, quite
simply.

I call Chaos-World the current clash of so many cultures set ablaze,

pushing each other away, disappearing, but still persisting, sleeping or
transforming themselves, slowly or at lightning speed: these bursts, these
explosions whose principle or economy we have not yet begun to under-
stand, and whose trajectory we cannot predict. The Whole-World, which
is totalizing, is not (for us) total.
And I call Poetics of Relation this possibility of the imagination that
leads us to conceive of the elusive ‘worldness’ of such a Chaos-World, at the
same time as it allows us to pick up some detail from it, and in particular
to sing the praises of our place, unfathomable and irreversible. Imagination
is not a dream, or the emptiness of an illusion.

You will have realized that one of the traces of this Poetics goes through
the common place. How many people at the same time, in opposite or
convergent situations, are thinking the same things, asking the same
questions. Everything is in everything, without being forcibly mixed
together. You come up with an idea, they greedily take it up, it is theirs.
They proclaim it. They claim it. This is what characterizes the common
place. It mobilizes our imaginations better than any system of ideas, but

* Where Glissant distinguishes in the phenomenological sense between ‘l’être’

and ‘l’étant’ I have translated these terms as ‘Being’ and ‘being’ respectively.
 The Cry of the World 13

only as long as you are looking out for it. Here are some that concern the
connection between cultures in world-wide Relation.

For the first time, the semi-totality of human cultures are entirely and
simultaneously put in contact and in effervescent reaction with one another.
(But there are still some closed places and some different times.)

The worldness, or totality, of the phenomenon defines its character: the

exchanges between cultures are not subtle, the adoptions or rejections are
fierce.
(The law of basic pleasure, individual or collective, reinforced or
maintained by the mechanisms of power and persuasion, presides over both
adoption and rejection.)

For the first time also, the peoples are completely conscious of the
exchange. The television of everything intensifies these kinds of connections.
(If there are surreptitious echoes, they are quickly spotted.)

The interrelations are strengthened or weakened at a speed that is

barely conceivable.
(In other words this speed gives us light in the frightening immobility
of so many dizzying changes in the world.)

Whole groups of influences (the dominant ones) take shape, in some

cases leading to a generalized standardization.
(Do not think that you can fight this just by exaggerating your
separateness.)

Relation implies no legitimizing transcendence. If the places of power are

invisible, the Centres of Law impose themselves nowhere.
(Also, Relation has no morality: it does not choose. And it does not
have to define anything that would be its ‘content’. Relation, because it is
totalizing, is intransitive.)

The interrelations proceed largely through fractures and ruptures.

They are even perhaps of a fractal nature: this is why our world is a
chaos-world.
Their general economy and their momentum are those of creolization.
14 Treatise on the Whole-World

From these Archipelagos that I live in, risen up among so many others,
I propose to you that we should think about this creolization.

An unstoppable process, which mixes the substance of the world, which

joins up and changes the cultures of today’s humanities. What Relation
gives us to imagine, creolization has given us to experience.
Creolization does not lead to loss of identity, to a dilution of the being.
It does not imply renunciation of the self. It suggests the distance (the going
away) from the overwhelming fixities of Being.
Creolization is not something that disturbs a given culture from the
inside, even if we know that a number of cultures have been and will be
dominated, assimilated, brought to the brink of disappearance. Beyond
these often disastrous conditions, it acts to maintain relations between
two or more cultural ‘zones’, brought together in a meeting place, just as a
Creole language functions on the basis of differentiated linguistic ‘zones’ to
take from them its new substance.

It soon becomes clear that although there have always been places of
creolization (cultural hybridities), that which interests us today concerns
the world-totality, once this totality has been realized (mainly through
the action of expanding Western cultures, that is to say, through the work
of colonizations). Relation feeds the imagination, which has still to be
imagined, of a creolization that is now generalized and does not weaken.
Creolization is unpredictable, it is never fixed, or stopped, or inscribed
in essences or absolutes of identity. To accept that the being changes
while remaining is not to veer towards an absolute. What remains in the
changing or the change or the exchange is perhaps first of all the inclination
or the daring to change.

I offer you the word creolization, to signify that unpredictability of

completely new outcomes, that saves us from believing in an essence or the
rigidity of exclusiveness.

*
 The Cry of the World 15

This shimmering of the being splashes over into my way of using

language: our common condition here is multilingualism.
From now on I write in the presence of all the world’s languages, in the
poignant nostalgia of their threatened future. I understand that there is
no point in trying to learn as many of them as possible: multilingualism is
not quantitative. It is one of the modes of the imagination. In the language
I use to express myself, and even if it is the only one I possess, I no longer
write in a monolingual fashion.
‘Maintaining’ languages, helping to save them from wearing out and
disappearing, constitutes this imagination of which there is so much to say.
Let us not believe that one language could, tomorrow and with no trouble,
become universal: it would soon perish, under the very code that its gener-
alized use would have brought about. Anglo-American pidgin first and
foremost threatens the surprises, the leaps, the organic, energetic life, the
precious weaknesses and the secret retreats of the English and American
and Canadian and Australian, etc., language. Simplification, which facili-
tates exchanges, immediately distorts them.

The first meeting of the International Writers’ Parliament, in Strasbourg

in 1993, was not completely polyglot, but it was certainly multilingual.
It was not the first time that writers and intellectuals tried to come
together in a conference or an assembly; history provides us with illustrious
examples.
It was perhaps not the first time that people tried to restore the meaning
of this word Parliament, not a place where one is elected, one votes and
decides, but a place where one speaks [parle].
But it was the first time that such a Parliament also proposed to listen,
quite simply – to what? We have already said: to the cry of the world.
Not theories, ideologies or powers – not a system or an idea of the
world – but the huge entanglement, where one neither sacrifices oneself
in lamentations nor gets carried away with hopes. The word of the world
crying out, where the voice of every community is heard. The accumulation
of common places, of displaced cries, of mortal silences, where one can
understand that the power of States is not our true motive, and agree that
our truths are not linked to power.
16 Treatise on the Whole-World

(And now having evoked languages under threat, langages on the way
out, I come back to another of my torments and repeat something I have
already said, like an echo streaked into a piece of chalk which in turn is
carved from fragile limestone.* This is to magnify the openings that the
exercise of translation creates between languages and langages):

Translation is like an art of flight, in other words, so eloquently, a renun-

ciation that accomplishes.
Renunciation when the poem, transcribed into another language, has given
up the greater part of its rhythm, its secret structures, its assonances, these
accidents that are the chance and the permanence of writing.
We must accept these losses, and this renunciation is the part of oneself that
in any poetics we give up to the other.
The art of translation teaches us the thinking of evasion, the practice of the
trace, which, as against systematic thought, points the way to the uncertain, the
threatened, which come together and strengthen us. Yes, translation, art of the
approach and the light touch, is a way of frequenting the trace.
Against the absolute limitation of the concepts of ‘Being’, the art of trans-
lation brings together the ‘being’. To trace in languages is to gather together the
unpredictable in the world. Translation does not consist of reducing something
to transparency, nor of course in joining up two systems of transparency.
Hence, this other proposition, which the practice of translation suggests: to
set against the transparency of models the open opacity of irreducible existences.

I claim for everyone the right to opacity, which is not the same as closing
oneself off.
It is a means of reacting against all the ways of reducing us to the false
clarity of universal models.
I do not have to ‘understand’ anyone, individual, community, people –
i.e. to ‘take them with me’ at the cost of smothering them, of losing them

* English has no equivalent for the distinction between ‘langue’ and ‘langage’,
which is an important element in Glissant’s discussion of language use. He
uses ‘langage’ to denote the speaker’s subjective attitude to the ‘langue’ (French,
English, Creole, etc.) that s/he uses.
 The Cry of the World 17

in a boring totality that I would be in charge of - in order to agree to live

with them, to build with them, to take risks with them.
Let opacity, whether it be ours for the other or maybe the other’s for
us, not close down in obscurantism or apartheid; let it be a celebration, not
a terror. Let the right to opacity, whereby Diversity will best be preserved
and acceptance strengthened, be a lamp watching over our poetics.

All of this, that I have briefly recalled, serves only to open up the trace
to other utterances. Here I am appealing to conjoined poetics. Our actions
in the world will remain sterile if we do not change, as best we can, the
imagination of the human communities that we constitute.

Proof of this for me is the people that Matta* assembled at the entrance
to that Writers’ Parliament, in Strasbourg in 1993. You were welcomed by
the cry of a whole crowd. A people of statues, where the Inca headdress
covered the Egyptian toga, where the sari from Africa was draped over the
Inuit pose, where the mouldings of bronze or copper, yellow breathing and
violet suffering, supported all kinds of stylized forms, recognizable and
intermixed, coming from all over the world, springing from so many of the
beauties of the world. These works were hybrid, their architecture revealed
diversity, mobilized by an artist into an unhoped-for result. Yes. These
statues brought together this cry.

A people that speaks like this is a country that shares.

* Roberto Matta (1911–2002) was a surrealist painter from Chile.

18 Treatise on the Whole-World

Archipelagic thinking suits the pace of our worlds. It has their

ambiguity, their fragility, their drifting. It accepts the practice of the
detour, which is not the same as fleeing or giving up. It recognizes the
range of the imaginations of the Trace, which it ratifies. Does this mean
giving up on self-government? No, it means being in harmony with the
world as it is diffracted in archipelagos, precisely, these sorts of diversities
in spatial expanses, which nevertheless rally coastlines and marry horizons.
We become aware of what was so continental, so thick, weighing us down,
in the sumptuous systematic thought that up until now has governed
the History of human communities, and which is no longer adequate to
our eruptions, our histories and our no less sumptuous wanderings. The
thinking of the archipelago, the archipelagos, opens these seas up to us.
 The Cry of the World 19

Even from the point of view of identity, the scope of the poem results
from the search, wandering and often anxious, of conjunctions of forms
and structures that allow an idea of the world, expressed in the poem’s own
place, to meet (or not) other ideas of the world. Writing draws the common
places of the real together to found a rhetoric. Michel Leiris did this in his
work. Maurice Roche also, in a different way.* Identity does not proclaim
itself, in this domain of literature and forms of expression: it is operational.
The proportion of the means of expression and their adequacy are stronger
than mere proclamation. Advertising one’s identity is nothing but uttering
a threat if it is not also the measure of a way of speaking. When on the
contrary we point to and inform the forms of our speaking, our identity is
no longer based on an essence, it leads to Relation.

* Michel Leiris (1901–1990) was a surrealist poet and ethnographer; Maurice

Roche (1924–1997) was a prose writer from the 1960s to the 1990s. Both were
friends of Glissant.
 • • •

Repetitions
Repetitions

The movements of the discovery and colonization of the world first of

all brought into contact atavistic cultures, which had long been established
each in its own belief and on its own territory.
Atavistic cultures, because they were legitimized by a Genesis, a
Creation of the world, which inspired them and of which they made a
Myth, the hub of their collective existence.
It is certainly a privilege to have direct access to the Sacred, to speak to
one’s God, to be entrusted with his intentions. As a result any community
or culture that thus generated a Genesis was determined to make of it a
lesson for everyone. Through an absolutely legitimate succession of filiations
(that cannot be challenged), it attaches itself to that first day of Creation,
and thus asserts its Right on the land that it occupies, which becomes its
territory. Filiation and legitimacy are the two pillars of that sort of divine
Right of property, at least as far as European cultures are concerned.
The cultures of the Arabic countries, black African countries and
Amerindian countries are also atavistic. With, however, all kinds of
nuances in their approach to the divine, in the imagined modes of Creation,
and consequently in their claims to the land they occupy.
The coming into contact of these atavistic cultures in the spaces of
colonization has given rise in places to composite cultures and societies,
which have not generated any Genesis (adopting Creation Myths from
elsewhere), for the reason that their origin is not lost in darkness, that it
is obviously of a historical rather than mythical order. The Genesis of the
Creole societies of the Americas is founded in a different obscurity, that of
the belly of the slave ship. This is what I call a digenesis.

Acclimatize yourself to the idea of digenesis, get used to its example, and
you will leave behind the impenetrable demands of exclusive uniqueness.
22 Treatise on the Whole-World

Composite societies relate to the sacred or the divine only indirectly,

one might almost say by proxy. Their sects, for example, combine surprising
syntheses of Genesis, borrowing from everywhere, in an exaggerated
fashion. When, as in Haiti or Brazil, one encounters religions whose inspi-
ration is from Dahomey, their impulse is atavistic and their rites composite.
But the societies in question have the advantage of not being constrained
by thousands of years of customs and undecipherable taboos, whose weight
would be crushing.

Most of the convulsions of our times are determined by this context:

atavistic cultures fighting each other to the death over their respective legit-
imacies, or quarrelling over the legitimate right to extend their territory.
Or imposing this legitimacy on other cultures of the world. Composite
cultures contesting old atavistic cultures over the last remains of their past
legitimacy.

These propositions, even if they have sometimes been copied by others,

must be repeated, for as long as they have not been heard.

Creolization is the putting into contact of several cultures or at least

several elements of distinct cultures, in a particular place in the world,
resulting in something new, completely unpredictable in relation to the sum
or the simple synthesis of these elements.
One can predict the outcome of a cross-breeding, but not of a creoli-
zation. Both of these, in the atavistic universe, were thought to produce a
dilution of being, a bastardization. Another unexpected fact is that this
prejudice is slowly dying out, even if it remains strong in immobile, barri-
caded places.

The idea of atavistic belonging helps people to endure destitution

and strengthens their courage in fighting servitude and oppression. In a
composite society where the elements of culture are hierarchized, where
one of them is made inferior compared to the others, the natural and the
only possible reaction is to valorize this element in an atavistic manner, in
a search for equilibrium, for certainty and permanence.
Could a homeless black American camping in cardboard boxes on an
icy New York pavement accept the idea of creolization? He knows that his
 Repetitions 23

race and the singularity of his race for the Other have a great deal to do
with the definition of his state.
Could the Amerindian societies threatened with extinction have
defended themselves in the name of creolization, when the very mechanism
that contributed, at least in the first instance, to their de-culturation
seemed to be no different from creolization?
But that is what is at stake. We will not be able to untangle the contra-
dictions of the Americas or the convulsions of the Whole-World until
we have resolved in our imaginations the quarrel of the atavistic and the
composite, of single root identity and relation-identity.

The United States of America for instance is a multi-ethnic society but

one in which the interchange of ethnicities, which should have been the
norm for such multiplicity, hardly ever happens. Three isolating factors are
in operation here:
– the ancient oppositions and the traditions of conflict between the
religions that came from Europe, whose impact on the new situation can
be more or less obscure, more or less innocent;
– the long struggle against the Amerindian nations (the Conquest of
the West) and their almost complete extermination;
– the deportation of slaves from Africa (the Slave Trade) whose reper-
cussions are still visible.
In all these cases, oppressors and oppressed needed to refer themselves
back to their ethnicity as a uniqueness or a value, and it is perhaps more
convincing or efficacious that these ethnic singularities be maintained: with
the result that history, at least up until the present, ends up in this apparent
contradiction: a multiethnic society that is prey to interethnic isolation.
A country of multiculturalism, the United States is not – or not yet
– a country of creolization. The latter, which is developing, needs general
agreement, which is difficult to obtain.

Finally, the question that should be implicitly inscribed in this debate

is the following: would a modern theory of multiculturalism not allow us,
in reality, just to camouflage the old atavistic reflex more effectively, by
24 Treatise on the Whole-World

presenting the relation between cultures or communities, within a large

entity like the United States, as a reassuring juxtaposition and not as an
unpredictable (and dangerous) creolization?

These propositions must be repeated, until they are at least heard.

 Repetitions 25

The Street of Mounting Desire ends up in the middle of the one hundred
and nine rivers that fall from the casuarinas and the wild mango trees.
There, we can taste the bitter mauby. The Street of the Green Cave widens
out, swells out its canefields until they reach the park of the sea, where the
bulls are kept. One can hardly see on the horizon the smoky little lights
where the zombies dance their dance, ah! all along the Street of Come Back
Here. We go fishing there at night, guarded by the mosquitoes. These
streets make up an archipelago, the archipelago makes foam, we inhabit
the foam. Big and strong, and hypocritical, The Street fouté-fè offers itself
to tourists. In its crossing, the Street of the Fine Evening Smoking fans the
flames of its volcanoes, like Man Tine smoking her pipe, her eyes closed.
We know that street can also be called ‘via’: we plunge into the Via dei
umiliati, in the direction of the Via dei malcontenti. At the end of the day we
run to make our bows, Street of the Mad Virgins. Then to do our washing,
Street of the Crouching Old Men. We overflow into the entrance, covered in
grass and culverts, of the Street of the End of the World.
 • • •

Treatise on the Whole-World

by Mathieu Béluse
by Mathieu Béluse

Book 1

The countries I live in are scattered like stars into archipelagos. They join
together the times of their bursting forth. When we come across an impen-
etrable piece of time, an unbreakable rock – which we also call a ‘bi’ – here
we are in front of this ‘bi’ of time, we are not disorientated by it, we go
around this obscurity, we tread the slightest ravine or the smallest cape,
until we can enter into it. The brilliance of the times, just like the brilliance
of the weather, does not lead us astray, in our countries.
We had known that we could live, not out of time, but without it, at
least without the need to organize it into regular lines or divide it into
permanent sections. The time as it passed was not lost, it was simply devoid
of life (and yet we remembered everything, in a muddle of appearances) and
life exploded not outside but across time, in these gatherings of sunshine
or rain, of Lent or of overflowing rivers, where with our little nets and a
lot of bubbles we caught the big black fish with square heads, or raked over
the depths of pools to hunt down the water, under the enormous eyes of
the jowly toads.
What we never failed to do was to think about faraway countries. As
though the image of spatial expanse corresponded to our lack of concern
for duration in time. In the unbreakable piece of time that my childhood
still represents for me, the life of distant countries was amazing. That really
helped us to learn the list of the eighty-nine departments of France that we
had to recite, chanting, with the main towns and the number of inhabitants
falling like drumbeats at the end of the line. Many of us had never seen
or thought about anything from France, even if we enjoyed French flour,
French onions and French butter, whenever we could get hold of a bit of
them.
28 Treatise on the Whole-World

Man Thimotée and her lover never stopped coming back together and
splitting up again. They would hold conversations that we could never
decipher. They spoke to each other through symbols and parables, as
though their relationship was made for the folk tale that we turned it into,
and their lives, when they were apart, no longer had any shape.
She would shout: ‘I am Brazil in embers [en braise] and I have glowed
[brasillé] in all winds. You do not know the heat of the steam on my skin
and on my continents.’
He would call her: ‘Halt, mademoiselle! Stay there and repeat. Consider
China and chinoiserie and the robe of the mandarin. I am the divination
and the life’.
She would sing: ‘We will pull the cord all around [tout autour] all the
days in the finery [atours] of the surroundings [alentour]’.
He would pray: ‘Oh God make the trace to have traced, make the world
to have summoned [que le monde a mandé], and then that the sun rises and
sets on this rope’.
ManTimothée sold fritters and cane syrup, locchios, mauby and holy
grass. Her lover fished. They imagined the faraway countries. One day
they were found dead in their shack, wearing their Sunday best, lying on
their bed, no-one could understand why. You never understand bitterness
or death. Was it in 1965, the year of the birth of Jérôme? This is what in
books they call a novel.

The reeds laid out to dry for making straw hats and fans, the
persimmon trees in the cool shade, the clumps of coffee plants in pink and
brown tunes, the joining together of the sugar cane plants that harass you
with their thorns and their suns, this is just a piece of that time that we
did not know and did not know that it had already caught us in its snare
and its rocks.
Because the thing that was called World War II was roaming around
us. Ever since the world first cried out, that is, since these drubbings of
rocks began to attack us, we have waged war, World or colonial, where
they have used us as cannon-fodder. And if you say that, simply that you
have fought in all these wars, they immediately delegate some official, with
the grimace of the accomplice or the slug [limace] of the transmuted, who
reproaches you: ‘Ah! You like talking about wars …’ But we did not decide.
We fought, if one can say that.
 Treatise on the Whole-World by Mathieu Béluse 29

And so, the World War evaporated around us. So much so that we too
learnt to count mechanically: Before, During and After the war. Which
was a way of gathering into a pile these rocks of time that were tumbling
down all around, so that at least they would stop attacking us.

The World War did not affect us directly. It had surrounded us with
thunderous great boats, this was the Mericans, occasionally visible on the
horizon. We were left there with all our embittered conflicts with one
another, under the vigilant eyes of the occupiers: vigilant in plundering
what little food remained in the country to nourish a voracious fleet. A
stretch of land surrounded by sea, that is, by cruisers and torpedo boats,
encourages you to imagine distant places. Those of us who left to join the
Resistance, across the St Lucia Channel in the south or that of Dominica
in the north, the Fanons and Manvilles* and others, ‘on a frail skiff’ on a
moonless night, had hardly escaped the Petainist patrol boats, and long
before humbly greeting the customs officers in the ports of Roseau or
Castries or being hoisted aboard one of those big boats, when they started
to realize that the faraway countries were not what they had imagined.
Perhaps quite simply because the fisherman who smuggled them across
had never told them that these Channels to the south or north were so
hard to cross.
So the great majority of the rest of us, who stayed there becalmed, were
dying from something that was not quite famine, on heaps of sugar cane
and therefore of red sugar, and on guns and thunderclaps and veritable
rivers of rum, which the békés** were storing while they waited for the sea
to be open.
We know that hunger makes you see into the distance. That is, when it
is not definitive, when it has not looted all life around it, and you still have a
few unripe green bananas that you have saved from the greed of the sailors
and buried behind your shack to escape from the requisitions.
Imagine what we imagined then. An immobile field of sparks far away
from the lands, where people ran without getting out of breath, worked
without getting tired, ate without running out of food, we hardly needed
to consult the Senegalese infantrymen garrisoned in the country to paint
a picture of what Senegal was, nor to question the Corsican adjutants of
the Colonial army to see exactly what Corsica was. If a civil servant of the

* Frantz Fanon, the well-known writer and activist; Marcel Manville was also
active in the Resistance, leaving Martinique to fight with De Gaulle.
** The white settlers in the French Caribbean.
30 Treatise on the Whole-World

general Government revealed that he was from the Cévennes, or if people

were blabbering about the Mericans and their country, where there is lots
of oil, fat and beef and apparently not much pork, we could start another
round and convoke the inhabitants of the Cévennes as much as we liked,
and the Mericans no less than we had to.
Alfonse Patraque (not to be confused with the policeman Alphonse
Tigamba)* had fallen madly in love with a ‘matador’** from St Lucia. Life
was already impossible for her, having entered Martinique on the quiet,
and finding herself under a Vichy government, while she was English. We
called people from St Lucia, black and white and Indian and Chinese, the
English. Désira had not had time to organize her return home, and now
it was too late, she had been blocked by the arrival of the French fleet,
the Béarn, the Surcouf, and the Émile Bertin, who had disastrously entered
the Baie des Flamands, fleeing both the German ships and the American
torpedo boats. And now, she had this big upset in her existence. It seems
that Alfonse had taken advantage of the situation, with a bit of singing, a
lot of excited talking, to get to what he thought was just a little conquest
of no importance. But then it had exploded in his body, and after that he
floated across space, just repeating: ‘My friends, my friends!’
Désira took advantage of this. She forced him, quite simply, to organize
a crossing of the St Lucia Channel. It was simple, she told him: ‘Promise
me that you will do it, or else I’m going down to the Port this evening.’
He retreated, exclaiming ‘Yes, yes!’ But none of the fishermen would take
those two, they didn’t have enough cash. They shouted to Alfonse: ‘So,
we’ve heard you want to go and join the Resistance?’ He explained: ‘No,
no, it’s not the country calling me, it’s the Lord of love’. He exhausted all
the possibilities, sailing boats, rowing boats, yalls, and even perhaps a little
motorboat that went back and forth between Marin and Fort-de-France.
What was it that had exploded in his body? He realized that the storm
had broken the first time he had put his hand on Désira’s body, in this shack
made of slates fitted in between poles of old wood, and she had pushed it
away, because she wanted to take the lead. Ever since then, Alfonse had
been feeling out of sorts; he wandered about in himself, searching for what
it was that had come gushing out of him.
He found a big raft, the kind that was used for fishing oysters, and
he equipped it just as a real amateur or a real fishing captain would have

* A character in Glissant’s novel Malemort (1975).

** The term ‘matador’ is used of strong, self-reliant or aggressive women in
Martinique.
 Treatise on the Whole-World by Mathieu Béluse 31

done, with sails, oars, rudder, storage cabin. At the time, he would hiss as
though in confidence (the authorities must not be alerted): ‘I want to see
the world, how it turns, and how it snows and makes ice, and how it burns.’
And he did see it. After crossing the Channel, which was a panic-stricken
rush, his body heaving on oars and ropes, the fight of a hero against the
zombie winds and the evil spells of the waves, they were greeted at dawn by
police from Castries who had come looking for them: they separated Désira
and Alfonse, he was put into the regiment of the Antilles-Guyane which
was fighting a German fortress in Bordeaux and (without even having the
time to size up or rediscover whatever it was that had throbbed inside him
so terribly) he died there from German shrapnel, ten minutes before the
fortress was officially taken.
Ten years later, I met another Désira, but I was never blessed to know
Alfonse’s torment. I took things as they never came, and I was always ready
for the pluperfect of the future. Men are always afraid, that is what keeps
them safe. But I don’t want to hide beneath generalities what belongs to
me alone.
32 Treatise on the Whole-World

‘Look’, she said, ‘the Amazonian forest, which is shrinking on its people
and relentlessly counts those who fall, and its trees uprooted at the same
time, a life a tree, a tree a life, cleared away. The forest of Zaire, a concen-
tration camp, covered in mass graves, traversed by walking skeletons. They
evaporate there, who could find their dust? We think about it, we think
about it, and then we move on to something else. We say that the forests
are the lungs of the earth. And so how can a forest cover such nights? How
does it not shift these mismatches made by men? Ah! I wish I could tell
you that I feel beautiful’.
 Treatise on the Whole-World by Mathieu Béluse 33

Book 2

That is what she used to say. It is because she was capable of living here
and over there, in several places at once, in several times, yesterday,
tomorrow, and so she was afraid. We like to cherish our loves and our
certainties in a place well lined with fabrics or leaves, soft and sweet. The
idea of wandering seems to us vagrancy of feeling and moral laxity. To
explore elsewhere frightens us, because we do not burn with the need to
conquer and we do not see why we should go off rambling everywhere.
Our imageries of the world were enough for us, they raved in us and
for us, without our having to go and see. And so I was afraid, without
realizing it, of a woman who could suddenly rush you off into places,
without you being able turn off along the way. We men, black roosters
and skinflints in huts, sense and feel that in the unhappiness that has
always been their lot, the women of our countries have steered the boat
of dreams and held the ropes of revolt and action and suffering, that we
cautiously walked round, trying not to pull too hard on the rope. Such is
their power. We resent it perhaps but, while we go on bragging as usual,
it makes us really anxious.
We are also afraid of the unpredictable and do not know how to
reconcile it with a possible concern to build, that is, to draw up plans. It
will take time to learn this new way of moving into tomorrow: expecting
uncertainty and preparing for what can only be guessed at.
But the women are not afraid of the unpredictable.
They are not allowed to see or touch the Gods but, better than any of
the officials of the rite, they sense them. They show the way ahead and
are able to prophesy; in modern parlance they are shrinks, they are the
shattered spies of the unforeseeable.

I had already experienced this kind of division. I had known Oriamé*

in what we call the Old Country, which is not, no monsieur, France, but
the lands of Africa.
She lived in a town whose name escapes me, the names of towns in this
far-off time indicated the function of the place or the colour of the ramparts
or their situation: if they were on the edge of the forest or if they planted
in the savannah their walls of dried mud or their round towers reflected
in rivers wider than the sea. But the sea was far away and those who lived

* A symbolic character who first appears in Glissant’s novel Tout-monde (1993).

34 Treatise on the Whole-World

near it had no idea what it was transporting away, protected as it was by

fierce surf and merciless sandbars.
In this far away time, there was no time, except that which goes from
the middle of the night to the middle of the day.

It was claimed that Oriamé the obscure was born in a shack where three
women lived and where a blacksmith had spent the night, one night. In this
darkness chosen at random, he had given birth. That is to say, the mother
of Oriamé had vanished into that night, she had not appeared.

The blacksmith had not deigned to build his shack in the area, and nor
did he want to work on the masks and the forms of our gods, perhaps he
knew other ones, more powerful and more fortunate. He had made tools
for everyone, without exception, without forgetting the very youngest
boys still living with their mothers, and then he went away, as though he
had suddenly died, leaving behind him only this collection of billhooks,
machetes and all sorts of other tools, without counting the imminent
arrival of Oriamé, of whom he was unaware. Relieved of the weight of the
metals he had brought with him to us, he went off to rejoin the company
of the ancestors and the gods, with whom he had a fixed appointment, but
outside any known time, under the branches of a baobab or a silk-cotton
tree or an acajou.

Oriamé’s mother dedicated her to the Lord, master of all lives, who was
called Askia, who sat in public on the backs of his prostrated slaves, carried
out raids all over the land, then shut himself up in the innermost room of
his big houses. All the lords were called Askia. In this far-off time people
did not know, although it was coming soon, that the slaves were much more
than slaves, that they were money, in property and wealth, they did not
know what money was.

Oriamé, daughter of chance, dedicated to Lord Askia. Or else, princess

born of such distant legends, and who refused him. She dies, by the hand
of a plotting minister, thrown into a gulf surrounded by log wood trees. No,
she is seized by a column of slave traders marching towards the sea, she
throws herself into the depths of the sea from the bridge of the Rose-Marie,
a slave ship. The ship’s lieutenant, who wanted to keep her for himself, tells
himself he has had a great loss. At the same time, two of the men shut up
in the hold, two maniacs, two men possessed, are fighting for her, without
noticing that she has jumped overboard, without even noticing that they
 Treatise on the Whole-World by Mathieu Béluse 35

are being taken, to where? Slaves in their chains, free men in all their
hatred. No, no. She loved me, Lord Askia. Of course I did not realize I was
African, Africa is not really Africa in other people’s eyes until its conquest,
I was a wanderer able to wear our masks, and Lord Askia did not conde-
scend to have me in his regiments – nor that I was going to be Antillean,
used to the splitting of my self and to running through time. She loved me,
Lord Askia. But I know that all this is delusion and vertigo.
Oriamé had no inclination, given her destiny, to love anyone, lord or
suitor.

After that, I entered a tale, which you call a novel. More surprised by
this entrance than to have known, long ago, a princess who was said to
be obscure. A tale, therefore a virtual world. I lived there according to
laws that are scarcely decipherable. Wild speed carried me away. At every
moment, crazy swerves into crossroads and turnings opened up unfath-
omable spaces. The colours shattered into pieces, but that was how they
rambled on in their langages. The time for living was the same as the time
for dying. The instant was identical to the duration.

At the same time, I am leading another life, supposedly real. I am

perhaps ‘he who occupies himself in the contemplation of a green stone’,
as the poet of Îlet-les-feuilles* says. And so I am vacant. Hurled into life.
I go through my day, I carry out my tasks. We live together, Marie Celat
and I, we have never got married, don’t tell me that I am going back over
stories already told. How much energy does it take to dig into a single
story. There is only ever a single story. The truth is that I discover how
much the life that is said to be real is mixed in with the virtuality of the
tale, or the novel. In the tale is told, although very elliptically, the life-and-
death of our two children, Patrice and Odono. The story-teller saw fit to
make public something that in any case everyone in the country knows. It
is also true that at one point in his story he made me die, or almost. A life-
enhancing experience. When the times of the tale are mixed up like this
with the times of life, it is the best way of staying there, suspended in the
middle of a clear spell in the forest. The clear spell is not the name of the
sun coming out after rain, it is a clearing, where the weather is sometimes
bad. Patrice crashed in an accident, motorbike against truck, Odono got
caught between two masses of seawater divided by a current. Or perhaps

* i.e. Saint-John Perse.

36 Treatise on the Whole-World

it’s the other way around, sometimes I confuse the circumstances of each.
As if the primordial waters and the brutal technology had got together to
break the trace of filiation.
The fact remains that I share this pain (more terrible than if it had
struck me alone) with Marie Celat, whom everyone here calls Mycéa.*
Mycéa is the most dangerous of prophetesses. Out of all this momentum
of the world as it prepares itself for us, as also this great white hole from
which we have come, she has created the pretext of her existence. If I were
not afraid of indulging in the worst possible sense of the common place,
I would say that Marie Celat is an avatar, perhaps sacred, or cursed, of
Oriamé. She has to throw herself in, every time, gulf or depths of the sea.
She tells herself that this disposition is the only one that she has trans-
mitted to her children, and that they followed it almost immediately, until
they accomplished it in sudden death. As for me, I tell myself over and over
again: what do I care about filiation, what I want is my children.
Is that what time is, for us? This repetition, from Oriamé to Mycéa?
The same way of arching their bodies, but with their feet planted firmly in
the ground, the same slight disdain of the lip when she shouts at you all at
once such implacably organized speeches. The same beauty, black and red,
with violet shadows, a beauty fiercely unaware of itself and which refuses
to be recognized.

Don’t say that I have looked for Oriamé in Mycéa, that is just stupid.
No absolute of pain resembles another absolute of pain. Do women look,
in the man that they are with, for a reflection of the one that was there
yesterday? Could I say that Mycéa knew me in the life of the Old Country?
Indeed, my life in the tale has joined my life, the only recourse I have been
able to find against this delusion is to put this ubiquity into precepts and
formulas, to scrape and hoe everything around it, in the hope that this
writing preserves me (the artifices of the langage I adopt acting as a barrier)
from listening to what is stirring beneath.

Some people cannot imagine the world, they rack their brains, but the
world does not come out to spread itself in front of them. Those for whom
it hurts to think about it, they too force it into these formulas that I use, for
the same (un)reason that we do not know how to get hold of it. It governs
our place, our narrative, our wandering.

* One of Glissant’s most important characters, who appears in virtually all his
novels.
 Treatise on the Whole-World by Mathieu Béluse 37

1. The Place. It is crucial, because one cannot replace it, nor go around
it.

But if you wish to profit in this place that has been given to you, reflect
on the fact that from now on all the places of the world are meeting up, as
far as the cosmic spaces.
You must no longer project into elsewhere the uncontrollable aspects
of your place.

Think of the spatial expanse and its mystery, so accessible. Do not leave
your shore for a voyage of discovery or conquest.
Let the voyage take over.

Or rather, leave from elsewhere and come back up here, where your
house and your source of water open up.
Run to the imagination, as much as we travel by the most rapid and
most comfortable means of locomotion. Plant unknown species in the
expanded lands, make the mountains join together.

Go down into the volcanoes and the destitutions, visible and invisible.

Do not believe in your uniqueness, or that your fable is the best one, or
that your word is superior.

In this way, you will come to realize this, which is the strongest kind of
knowledge: that the place grows bigger in its irreducible centre, just as much as
in its incalculable borders.
38 Treatise on the Whole-World

2. ‘Enough lamentations! Les us dare to move on. Let us come down the
narrative into our present, and thrust it into the future! Let us explore the
sufferings that are here now, in order to prevent those that will appear later.’

I agree with this. Oh, yes! I agree. But let’s be careful that our narrative
does not get mixed up, perhaps, with this thread that has been spun for us.
Let’s not bite on this line. The world’s narratives run round in circles, they
don’t follow the line, they have the impertinence of so many breaths, whose
source is unsuspected. They rush down in all directions. Join in with them!

As for us, we were taught to tell: a story. To consent to History. To

gild ourselves with the sparkle of its style, which we believe to be ours. We
have been given the thread. But the folk tale does not tell a story, the folk
tale does not count up our woes, it rushes forth from the hidden source
of suffering and oppression, and it rejoices in unknown, perhaps obscure,
kinds of happiness.

What you would call our narratives, they are perhaps like long
breaths without beginning or end, where the times roll up on themselves.
Diffracted times. Our narratives are long chants, treaties of joyful speech,
and geographical maps, and joking prophecies, that don’t care about
verification.

Or perhaps, our narratives, those hastily sculptured pieces of bark, of

mahogany, of ancient acoma, on which we recognize, just like on an identity
card, the eyes the forehead the nose the mouth the chin of a black maroon.
 Treatise on the Whole-World by Mathieu Béluse 39

3. Wandering is the very thing that allows us to fix ourselves. To leave

these object lessons that we are so inclined to lecture on, to abdicate that
tone of judgment with which we stifle our doubts – myself first of all – or
our declamations, and to drift, finally.
Drift towards what? The fixity of the movement of the Whole-World.
Those games of hopscotch, tragic, frenzied, meek or happy, that we play
and whose horizons do not form the lines.

Wandering enables us to moor ourselves to that drift that does not get
lost.

The thinking of wandering releases the imagination, projects us far

from that imprisoning cave in which we were huddled, which is the hold or
the rock of the so-called powerful uniqueness. We are greater, with all the
variations of the world! With its absurdity, where nevertheless I imagine.

Then, looking all around us, we perceive only disaster. The impossible,
the denial. But this sea that explodes, the Caribbean, and all the islands in
the world, are Creole, unpredictable. And all the continents, whose coasts
are immeasurable.

What is this voyage, which grasps its end in itself? Which stumbles
into an ending?

The being and wandering have no end, change is their permanence!

They continue.
40 Treatise on the Whole-World

Book 3

You ask why I am jumping about like this, going from polished sentences
to all kinds of jumbles of words? And then, these acrobatics with time,
Oriamé, Mycéa, Désira? I am imbued with landscapes, it’s the only retreat
I can have. Hidden beneath the river water, shining on the pavements of
towns, asleep in the green of grass and tree, sparkling in the mirror of salt
or sands, secretly tormented, those that enhance their skies, those that
reveal the depths.
Time is one landscape and then another, as you walk on. You enter into
the times, and there, you live more than you desire. The women are like
the landscape. And if a woman changes and goes away, it’s because for her
too you are a landscape, and for her just as for you the countries call out.
In this place where we live, they say it’s cultural. A hybridity of men and
women, of falling times, of horizons that move.

Many people however do not understand this. They are as cautious as

an opossum. They try hard to evoke the world, they cannot. They cannot
marry the landscapes together. They cannot choose all the women.
How would they know how to cry out? In this disorder and this energy,
which story should one choose to tell? To take this diagonal and follow it
to the end is an illusion. You still have the recitation of everything that
trembles around you.
But, it seems, there is no longer even any need to imagine. You have at
your disposal all these televisions and radios and newspapers. Which recite
to you what they claim to be the novel of what is. You end up confusing
one war with another. There is no peace. The instant has not joined up with
duration, it has exploded in it. We must refuse this notion of the identical.
We must attend to the depths.
 Treatise on the Whole-World by Mathieu Béluse 41

1. Questioning the identical does not mean distracting from identity.

We observe how many old masters, now become master thinkers,

delight in the speech of their flock, who used to be servants and at their
beck and call, when this speech valiantly closes in on itself and resounds
with supposedly primordial authenticity.

Argue, no less valiantly, that you are calculating not your being but your
dwelling. Because you are leaving for faraway places. Don’t be afraid that
they will accuse you of working like an intellectual. They will do so in any
case. It’s because they are afraid that you are.

They share, the ex-master and the ex-slave, the belief that identity is
a root, that the root is unique, and that whatever happens it must go one
better.
Get ahead of all this. Go on!

Blow up this rock. Gather up the pieces and spread them out across the
expanse of space.

Our identities relay each other, and so these hidden hierarchies, or

those that surreptitiously maintain themselves under praise, fall away into
futile claims. Do not agree to these manoeuvres of the identical.

Open up to the world the field of your identity.

42 Treatise on the Whole-World

2. Ah! We are afraid to go into the depths. The depths, for us, is the
mangle and the mangrove. But we know that they are not the same.

The mangle: the water and the land at their edges, where we have lived.
The land crabs, crabs of the depths. The fights of the wild cats and the
vetiver trees. We were not a problem for the mangle. We loved roaming
about in it (but at the risk of the thrashing that Marie-Euphémie had
waiting for you when you got home, that was the price of the adventure).
We took a lot from the mangle, without noticing. Dark, complicated, lost
in the branchings of red roots, it began at the cemetery and gnawed at the
coast with yellow water coming up against blue water, up to the mouth
of the Rivière Salée. We saw the world in it: these possibilities that arose
under our gaze.

The mangrove is this mangle, but once we have separated ourselves

from it, because we have taken it over. The space is the same, the species
also, but they are becoming rarer. Still that smell of rusty mud, of organic
rubbish – still this throbbing of the water as it heats up. We crisscross the
mangrove, we cover it with tracks and roads. We dig excavations into it,
we fill it in. We try but in vain to reach its depths. It has retreated behind
the mystery of its rubbish.

The mangrove is the mangle when it has been through our uncaring
hands.
 Treatise on the Whole-World by Mathieu Béluse 43

On the edge of the Mississippi river, facing the main square of the
town, immediately in tune with the light and the noise as though it were
a familiar place, we cut through the crowds of tourists, the carriages, the
paintings on display, the distant, lost accents of the café music – we don’t
know if it’s jazz or, more probably, old tunes that come from the past, the
sonorous keys of memory.
The raucous chant of the Natchez announces its next departure. This
riverboat, as traditional as it could be, takes tourists to the port of New
Orleans. One would never have imagined that an organ sound could be so
shrill. We had gone on this river tour once and had felt the boredom and
the gentle emptiness. There is not much to see: the long convoys of barges,
between the carcasses of the factories.
This river port has none of the strangeness of seaports. It is just as
engaging. You come upon something strange in the air, that holds you there
in suspense.
One question from the world runs through this air, flies in English, in
French, in all the languages of the tourists: What are the results of the
elections in South Africa?
 • • •

Waves and Backwashes

Waves and Backwashes

Waves

Everything bursts open, everything sounds and blows in the wind.

Everything loses its way and goes down, only to rise again to this wind. It
is nothing but assault, vertigo and, drifting, this time. Fields and hill and
ravine, mountains and bays! A person who outdoes you in grand passion:
a landscape. An imprisoned spring, a muddy delta. And then the cry and
the word, in the moment and in duration. Everything to me is seasons
and rhythms, that I push towards the single Season. Then I feel like the
son and the stranger, together. In the language that I shout, my langage
screeches in gusts. The gentle marshes fall silent. Stories unravel History.
Everything to me is a wave, narrated! Everything to me is Béluse and is
Longoué, that the wind slopes down.* The wave is a backwash, bewildered
at constantly turning.

* Béluse and Longoué are the main characters of Le Quatrième Siècle (1964);
Longoué reappears in subsequent novels.
46 Treatise on the Whole-World

There is an Italy also in the world of the moon. With its expanded regions,
a North that brigades a South, mounted towns, painted landscapes,
multiple languages … I have suggested, it was in L’Intention poétique,* and
following the Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite, that for the
Caribbean, ‘unity is submarine’. A reference to transportation, the common
place of the Caribbean peoples, and to the Africans thrown into the sea,
weighed down with cannonballs, from the bridges of the slave ships. This
‘buried’ unity reveals and indicates that the relations between the compo-
nents of Caribbean reality are not only rational and logical but above all
subliminal, hidden, in constant transformation. To express this, that we
share multilingually between us, it is langage that counts here, as it deflects
the limits of the languages used.

* L’Intention poétique, a collection of Glissant’s essays published in 1969.

 Waves and Backwashes 47

The name Mathieu

These names that I inhabit are organized into archipelagos. They

hesitate on the edge of some kind of density, that is perhaps a break, they
find a way around any interpellation, which they move infinitely beyond,
they wander and meet up, without my thinking about it.

The name Mathieu was given to me at my baptism (on St Matthew’s

day, 21st September), then abandoned in the customs and the bustle of
childhood, taken up again by me (or by a demanding character, this Béluse)
in imagination, and finished or started again by attaching itself to Mathieu
Glissant. He is not aware – after Barbara and Pascal and Jérôme and
Olivier, and in any case, in this year of 1996, he is only seven years old – of
this long track along which his name has wandered.

I used to think that the name Glissant, probably handed out like most
Antillean surnames, was the insolent reversal of the name of a settler, i.e.
Senglis. Names in reverse mean something.

We foster in ourselves the instinct of illegitimacy, which here in the

Antilles is a derivative of the extended African family, an instinct repressed
by all kinds of official regulations, of which the advantages of Social
Security are not the least effective. I have been called Glissant from about
the age of nine, when my father ‘recognized’ me. Still today, primary school
pupils miraculously re-encountered at Lamentin airport call me by the
name that I had then, which there is no need to recall. These schoolfriends
are becoming rarer and rarer and that name (which is my mother’s) will no
longer be applied to me – motor of an identity or beginning of a scattering
– when these very old companions have gone, and myself with them. My
mother is dead, hope carried her away. We must let the names that incline
us to melancholy sleep inside us.

My local nickname will go away too, the private name reserved for
friends, who had chosen it. It was ‘Godbi’, and we also had among us
Apocal, Babsapin, Tikilic and Totol. Macaron, Chine, Sonderlo. The only
one of this band whose name was not changed was Prisca: it was already
surprising enough that a boy ‘bore’ this girl’s name.

*
48 Treatise on the Whole-World

‘Marie Celat laughed at our fondness for giving everything names, and
if she accepted the disguises of individual names for which we showed
such functional, precise, witty and irrational imagination (there are still
today those among us, big fellows of over fifty, dignitaries of masonic
lodges, elected politicians, poets disappeared elsewhere or solidly installed
civil servants, who are indeed – in life and not in stories – called (for us)
Apocal or Babesapin (with or without an “e”) or Tikilik – Tikil, or Atikil
or Atikilik, it’s the same thing – or Godby (Godbi) or Totol, also known
as Potolé, Prisca alone having escaped this practice of dispersion, for the
reason that his official first name, feminine, fixed and invariable, was
already enough of a nickname), she always claimed that we didn’t call a
possum a possum, or Le Lamentin, Le Lamentin’ (La case du commandeur).

Such baroque nicknames, decided and agreed on by us, wove a pact,

secret but part of the ordinary course of life. Neither the complicity nor
the pact is ostentatious. It is like this all over the world, in the forgotten
districts of big towns, tracks in the bush where people walk silently past
each other, with just a slight gesture of the hand, villages crouching under
their foliage, deep expanses of living desert. We would dive into the
Lézarde, which is now nothing but a filthy line of yellow water streaked
with plastic and rubbish (‘The Lézarde like a trickle of mud alongside
the landing strip’, ibid), we would dance through the three days and three
nights of carnival without stopping, we would breathlessly recite poems and
inform ourselves as quickly as possible on the agricultural trade unions.

I have so many names within me, and so many countries, signified by

my own. This is what Marie Celat taught me, as she roamed through our
stories like an abandoned animal. Names wander within us, perhaps we
also keep a load of them in reserve, one for the plain, one for the archi-
pelago, one for the path or one for the desert. The dance of the names is
in tune with the unfolding of the landscapes. One rushes down them or
slowly follows their course. They accumulate lands and seas around them,
and we never know if we are going to plunge into them to rest, or if we will
perhaps join them up, wandering and open, with so many faraway beaches
and rivers.
 Waves and Backwashes 49

Filiation and legitimacy wove the fabric of continuous duration. They

ensured that no discontinuity would intervene to break up the certainty
or corrupt the belief. They established law on the territory. What caused
tragedy were the moments in which they found themselves threatened,
from within or from outside, either by the faults of their holders or the
enterprises of usurpers. The epic poems and tragic songs relate all this.
But what are we to do now? The territory of power is invisible and has no
particular relationship to a land, a soil, a homestead. You can conquer a
place without occupying it. This is what is called a market. The daughters
are in Bamako while the mothers are in Rio. The fathers advise their
children by email. The community’s land is the ultimate wandering, where
sometimes you take your house with you, like a wagon. Yet most people
cling to this legitimacy, which they calculate still ensures their privilege.
One might suppose for instance that one of the defects of democratic
systems is that every person elected, on the strength of their acquired
legitimacy, is as though fatally drawn into arrogance and self-importance,
being unable to imagine that legitimacy can be temporary. States, religions,
doctrines, nations, tribes, clans and families build their irreducible defences
on such a certainty.
A reader writes to me that she has not read my work on Faulkner and
his Yoknapatawpha county but that she is surprised at my interest in this
backward little corner of Mississippi, or something like that. The work
has no need to be defended and it would be ridiculous of me to do so.
But I could reply that William Faulkner, through his questioning of the
legitimacy of this closed place, by showing the perversions of its filiation,
has opened it up to the dimension of the world.
50 Treatise on the Whole-World

The concept can be both open and closed, mysteriously.

Systematic thought abolishes that which in the concept is an opening
up.
Trace thought confirms the concept as movement, and relates it: gives
its narrative, places it in relation, sings its relativity.
 Waves and Backwashes 51

The cypress trees gnawed by epiphytes, planted upright in the water of

a Louisiana bayou; the giant ferns overhanging the sheer cliff of the Route
de la Tracée in Martinique; the tide of vegetation, at Tikal in Guatemala,
with, rising out of it, the galleons of the temple pyramids, with their
flights of steps like so many oars waiting; the pathetic vigil of the palm
trees, all over the hills of Santiago in Cuba; the opening of paths between
the sugar cane plants, which imprison you in every direction; the hoarse
fissures of buried ravines or great canyons open to the sky; the yellowing of
the mangroves, bordering the emerald blue of the sea around the town of
Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe; the bottomless barrels of the Guyanan rain
that have always marked out the chaos of its forest; the overflowing rivers
transporting earth, the Mississippi and the Amazon, and also the little
streams drying up under their rocks; and the waterfalls transfixed in their
infinite violence, El Salto del Angel, or tiny and secret below the rusts of
time: the landscapes of the Americas are openness, immeasurability, a kind
of irruption into spaces. The people’s histories cling to them and carve out
monuments, which the energy rising from the earth moves and changes
infinitely.
52 Treatise on the Whole-World

Backwashes

We write in the presence of all the world’s languages.

We share them without knowing them, we invite them to join the

language that we use. Language is no longer the mirror of any Being. The
languages are our landscapes, which the thrust of the day changes in us.

Opposed to standardization, to banalization, to linguistic oppression,

to the reduction to universal pidgins. But knowing already that we will not
save one language by letting the others perish.

For with every language that disappears a part of the human imagi-
nation is lost forever: a part of the forest, of the savannah or the crazy
sidewalk.
The taste of tin plates, the flavour of food. The price of hunger.

The imagination radiates and reforms itself in the mingling of the

Whole-World. The mingling of languages in turn is made comprehensible
to us by the language that we use: our use of the language can no longer
be monolingual.

If the French language had been offered to me or imposed on me (they

tried, it’s true) as the sole experience of its only traditional space, I would
not have been able to use it. A language enriches itself by allowing us to
trace our langage within it: the poetics of our relation to the words.

In the same way, a composite language such as Creole cannot be

defended in the atavistic mode of uniqueness or closure. Closed uniqueness
threatens the interweaving of languages today, and it is the weave of
Diversity that supports them.

A langage is above all this: the crazy frequentation of the organic, of

the specificity of a language and, at the same time, its sober opening onto
Relation.

(The backwash is repetition, which endlessly tears itself apart.)

 Waves and Backwashes 53

And of course, what we do not forget is forever in the future. We

wait for a cyclone, year after year, in this drily archived procession of our
catastrophes. We know that it will come, but from where, and when? On
Guadeloupe again, on Dominica? The hurricanes swell in the depths of
the Atlantic, they come spinning towards us, they pass between us, they
pass over us. Who will be hit this time, oh mother Caribbean? Always
the wind twisting, the forest in wild disarray, the volcano’s voices spilling
forth, the shaking that lays waste the black earth with its volleys of red
earth. We draw on these extremes and we reinforce ourselves with this
violence, without knowing it. This danger preserves us from the certainties
that would limit us.
 • • •

The Time of the Other

The Time of the Other

Measure is seen as responding to a search for depth: one of the ways

taken in the quest for the essence of things, a regulation of the pursuit
of the True. The writing of the European languages, and in particular
of French, complies with this: an architecture in which, as though in the
nave of a sacred site, our singing rises up towards a presence that remains
unattainable. This kind of measure, paradoxically, is wholly a sequencing, a
metrics. The arrangement of a rhythm, which is a pre-existing rule, creates
and expresses the mystery, or the depth. Metrics and prosody are protective
obstacles.
Measure is also seen as the echo of the human breath. No longer the
search for depth but the inspiration of the spatial expanse. This kind of
measure enables us to drift through the fullness (or the surface) of the
world, bringing it back to our own place.
56 Treatise on the Whole-World

At the beginning of ‘universal’ Western time

The European Middle Ages fascinate us, and not just because the
West for a long time imposed its models on almost everyone else, until
the movement of the histories of peoples plunged us into other modes of
knowledge. We find there both the dawn and the night, and that indistinct
moment when all things seem to hesitate on the edge of their singularity,
both drawn to it and troubled by it.
Midnight-midday. An age of bursting forth that is also a beginning of
time. Conducive to both lucid wakefulness and tormented sleep.
One is tempted to link it to other periods, to what we think we know,
albeit only slightly, about the different cultural zones of the world. Ages
that are said to be dark, periods of renaissance, eras of classicism, times
of transformation and revolution: we are inclined to find elsewhere this
movement of European histories, which has had implications for the
whole world. We believe that we are approaching both a mystery and
its resolution. Influenced by the formidable powers of persuasion of the
Western linear time that was conceived in this half-shadow, a time that
we tend to consider a definitive result, we find ourselves almost adopting,
in our exploration of this period, the attitudes and formulations of the
sorcerer’s apprentice – convinced that we can easily gain an overview of
it and that, as with modern chaos theory, we grasp its principal themes.
Illusions that are emphasized by our innocently pedantic exposition of our
knowledge, which will certainly irritate specialists in the subject.
The apparent disorder that seems to us to overwhelm these European
Middle Ages is the main reason why we have linked it to our time (our
times). Peoples and people today, who have had the privilege of reflecting on
the passage of times and on their ‘reunion’ in a planet-wide intermingling,
perhaps feel that the bursting open of our world will be followed by another
beginning. The mystery, and its resolution. Such a hope, teleological in its
inspiration, has made the European Middle Ages a precious object of study.

By its multiplicity first of all. For example, the multiple centres or

cultural focus points, of which the main ones are: the Flemish or Nordic
centre, where the tendency to mystical thought is dominant; the Celtic
centre, in both islands and the mainland, where the ancient Gods and
ancient powers unceasingly disappear and are reborn; the Languedoc
centre, creator of fruitful heresies; the Provençal and Italo-Lombardian
centre, which glories in allegory and brings the joyfulness of the repre-
sentation of the world; the Norman centre and the Île-de-France, which
 The Time of the Other 57

extends (and vice versa) into England and where there is very soon a
strengthening of these attempts at synthesis and resolution that will end
up as sumptuous autocentrisms.
These centres influence each other or fight each other, and quickly
discover the secret of meetings with other sites of thought, classical Greek
or Roman, Hebrew or Arabic, and consent to learn from them. Diversity
does not at first lapse into self-sufficiency, and the cultures do not isolate
themselves in sectarian complacency, at least not yet. It is at the turning
point of the Middle Ages, once the muffled conflict that underlies this
period (between wandering thought and systematic thought) has been
resolved, that this whole constellation will keel over into the Unique,
accompanying on the one hand the constitution of nations that are antago-
nistic towards each other but constituted on the same rationalizing model,
and on the other hand the introduction of a universality of belief that will
very soon become a belief in the universal.
There are two constant factors that work to crystallize, in the melting
pot of this period, the whirlpool of opposites that, attracting and repelling
each other, will ‘produce the universal’. The influence of the Middle East,
less noticeable and immediate than that of Greece and Byzantium, for what
concerns the science of Being. And technical needs, which are behind the
huge wave of practical inventions in the Middle Ages and prefigure, with
the first attempts at experimentation (such as those of Roger Bacon) a
science of the world.

The melting pot, the universality of belief, the force that impels this
play of opposites, is Faith. So that Gustave Cohen* can sum it up like this:
‘Everything here [i.e. in the Middle Ages] is seen from the angle of the
Universal, Infinity and God, so that every object of perception appears
as a reflection of the Cosmos, and this is the principle greatness of this
time.’
Can it be proved that this lack of differentiation between the Universal,
God, the Infinite and the Cosmos is admissible? God ‘represents’, for the
Middle Ages, the supreme answer to the impossibilities or the unknowns
of the Infinite and the Cosmos. In the eleventh century St Anselm

* A French medievalist, 1879–1958.

58 Treatise on the Whole-World

pronounces the ‘Credo ut intelligam’, ‘I believe in order to understand’, which

is not far off from ‘I believe because I understand’, and which increases the
rationality of the ‘nisi credideritis non intellegetis’ of Isaiah, taken up again
the in the ninth century by John Scotus, otherwise known as Eriugena.
But St Anselm’s formula is the best example of the opposition between
this attempt at Christian rationality, which culminates in the Summa of
Albert the Great and of Thomas Aquinas, and the temptations of the
thought of the Infinite and the Cosmos, which during the same period
follows more obscure paths, indirect and usually forbidden. Although
unbelievers are rare, the mode of accession to knowledge through faith
remains questionable. The luminous mysteries of the intelligible may for
example seem less attractive than the ineffable experience of mystical
intuition. Or the rough stature of thought that refuses to ‘understand’ the
unknowable in a system of reassuring transparency and prefers to confront
the impossible. There are no atheists, only heretics.

Mystical experiences and approaches based on knowledge are engaged

in the same quest for a total knowledge, and one can say that in this sense
Ramon Llul (who wrote The Book of the Friend and the Beloved) does not
contradict Thomas Aquinas. But what is at stake is crucial, regarding the
mode and soon the nature of knowledge, and will influence and orientate
this set of cultures that will go on to dominate the world. Particular or
ecstatic invention will give way to rationalizing bodies of thought and
then to the absolute generalization of systematic thought, Descartes or
Leibniz. What the West will export to the rest of the world, will impose on the
world, will not be its heresies but its systems of thought, its systematic thought.
English empiricism, Locke or Hume, despite its determination to refute
the generalizations of thought, will nevertheless constitute a generalization
of a different kind, a self-sufficient system, which will itself contribute to
repressing the ardent and tumultuous mêlée of the Middle Ages.
Two stances, two opposing orders, two extremes in the search for
knowledge: the Middle Ages will be the scene of their opposition and,
when systematic thought has won, the Universal, first Christian and then
rationalist, will take over as the specific achievement of the West, even after
the latter has prepared what Nietzsche called the death of God.
The unique feature of this period is to have been the theatre for such a
long quarrel, to have lived through the anxiety of such a decisive dispute,
of a suspense that plunged the being into Gehenna, and to have first of
all tried to put forward a response that was flamboyant, solar and lunar,
 The Time of the Other 59

totalizing: that of the heresies, which was opposed to generalization, to

Summa, to systematic thought.

The feverish, breathless quality of medieval faith, and also its inhuman
enormities, accompany this enterprise whose changes bring together the
demand for belief and the demand for obedience, heroic heresy and
the Inquisition, tolerance and the Crusades, Jewish teachings and the
pogroms, Arabic medicine or philosophy and anti-Saracen racism, Thomist
pre-rationalism and sombre Cathar penitence, the feudal turbulences
and the search for monarchist order, the supporters of the pope and the
servants of the emperor, scholastic knowledge and nocturnal knowledge.

Wild and shadowy, or mystical and feverish, or pre-rationalist and

dreamily lucid, according to the common place that we have made of it and
given it, medieval faith remains the detour whereby these cultures, through
massacres and violent deaths, tried to bring about the progress, or simply
the salvation, of the individual, so that he could accede to the dignity of
the human person. This is why, in this faith, a special status was accorded
to Jesus Christ, who became man, and to Our Lady, who is his mother
without sin. Individuation is a primary mystery, and the individuation of
Christ opened up the way to its becoming general. It alone could do that.
If the whole of man, flesh, soul and spirit, is in Christ, then the universal
can take off. Still today, Western cultures hold together the generality of
the Universal and the dignity of the human individual, in spite of all the
brutalities, oppressions and exploitations that their societies have inflicted
on the world.

After that of the Incarnation, the other question that tormented for
example the thinkers of the Carolingian Middle Ages, Alcuin or Eriugena,
revolved around the impossibilities of the Resurrection and was formulated
as follows: how does the soul separate itself from the body? – in other
words: how do bodies ‘become’ spirit?
Let us not forget that in the seventeenth century Descartes was still
proposing to solve the problems of the relation between body and mind
only by the hypothesis of animal spirits.
These same torments, in so many different forms, overwhelm medieval
thinking. How could animality, which was responsible for the fall, be
60 Treatise on the Whole-World

transcended in Love – in courtly love? How might the individual contain

or resume in his imperfections the absolute dimension of the person? This
will later be Pascal’s question. Should the diverging temporal authorities
not submit to a single spiritual authority? How could matter, in its gross
disruptions, lead to the pure receptacle of the philosophers’ stone? And,
finally – this will become the question of Montaigne’s time – how could
diversity raise itself up into universality? But we know that Montaigne, in
his time, will mistrust universal resolution.

A dialectical torment, and one that affects all levels, from the
metaphysical to the technical. Transmute the disparate weights of marble
and stone into the convergent momentum and daring of the arch, and you
will have cathedrals.
Call for the single Word in the silence, which is the annulment of the
diversity of voices, and it will be the cloister.
A number of technical inventions are thus motivated or secretly impelled
by this pressure to support the Unique, even if this is not yet scientific.
The clock challenges the disparities of solar and lunar time, and calls
for the universal of an absolute time. Polyphony is the perfect unitary
resolution of diversities of sound and voice, insufficient to themselves in
their specificity.
The space of the world, the time of the world, the sound of the world
will be transcended in intelligible perfection.

The mystical experiences and the rationalizing summae are identical

in nature. The latter, the Summae, hold out the promise of access to a
soothing totality, where mysteries are accepted with all the will of the
person. It is not surprising that the principles of Aristotle’s Organon should
at first have led in this direction. The former, the mystical experiences, do
not plunge the individual into the closed depths of the singular but into
the ecstasy of a super-knowledge of the Whole. The heresies alone preserve,
powerfully, the voice of specificities, the piling up of irreducible diversities,
and finally the determination not to try to ‘understand’ the unknown, just
in order to then generalize it into formulae and systems. But they will be
swept away.

We admire the poet Marcabru’s claim that the people of France accept
the ‘afar Deu’: the ‘thing of God’, perhaps the Thing-God, or perhaps the
affair of God, or the Affair-God.
The multiple meaning of such an expression, of such an image, suggests
 The Time of the Other 61

that it has to do with a sacred expedient, a sacred detour, in order to ‘under-

stand’ oneself as essence and project. God is the all-powerful generalizer,
and so the vector of a human, an all too human power, which will soon
engender the thinking of the Universal.

Therefore the question that I would ask about the European Middle
Ages is not that of the opposition of Reason and Faith, since both of these
will endeavour to reach this Universal, and will succeed, that is to say not
in ‘realizing’ it, but in imposing it. Rather, my question is the following:
why, in this search for knowledge, have the paths of the non-generalizing,
of the esoteric for instance (which is always marked with the sign of the
ambiguous and the unpredictable), and the mystical, in any case of heresy,
gradually given way to the striving towards totalitarian generalization?
Why has the rationality of the Universal become the precious and semi-
exclusive claim of this collection of cultures that has been called the West?

In my mind I hurtle down spaces and times, the rivers of China and
their smooth silence, which extend into archipelagos and overflow into
the lands, each time engulfing many thousands of men and women and
children in their ritual floods, the calendars of Heaven that preside over
the destinies of Empire, and the hiding places in the bush and the Chain
of Ancestors of the African countries, the savannahs pulsing beneath
their grasses laid low by heat and the stories of the griots imbued with
a wisdom that grows into a shade-giving tree, the delicate details of the
Indian mythologies with their green marble and their gymnastic couplings,
the temples pillaged in the peaks of the Andes and the oblique words of
the Amerindian Myths, the chronicles of the hundred kingdoms of feudal
times in Japan, the shortened proverbs of the Madagascan and Oceanic
and Caribbean countries and the archipelago of the Indian Ocean, the
splendours of the desert and of pre-Islamic rhetoric, and the drapes of their
women poets, half slaves and half goddesses, the stiff and gentle baroque
of Creole languages, and so many flowery anthologies declaimed in so
many islands, and the stone roots lifting up gods who can see everything,
in the flooded gorges of the Indo-Chinese peninsula, and the swell and
the backwash of all the seas ploughed in circles by their peoples (not that
deadly projection towards new lands to be conquered), I cross the heights
of yet more deserts, deserts that are always around and that are in fact truly
universal, and the silences of the Sierras, I quake with the earthquakes and
the eye of the hurricane is watching me, and so many wars have ravaged
everywhere that there are no longer any dreams where one could gather
62 Treatise on the Whole-World

oneself, and so many unfathomable epidemics have eaten up the thought

of the world like a rotten overripe fruit, I travel the twelve routes of Egypt’s
Book of the Dead, and the enormous flatness of towns crackles on the edge
of the Archipelagos, carrying its mangroves of poverty and sudden sounds,
I admire everywhere so many inventions, techniques woven into the humble
artisanal energy of every day, I shout so many poems and I try to decipher
so many depths, but nowhere in the little that I know and in nothing of
what I imagine of this world, do I come across the ardent stigmata of that
rigid will that leads to the Universal, of which the Middle Ages were the
battleground, the arena and the painful and triumphant resolution.

There is no point in stating that Reason was born with the Greeks
and that the medieval period gradually rediscovered and then extended
its principles, which will be perfected in the following centuries. Reason
could have developed on the margins of generalization. Of all the civili-
zations, that of the West is the only one to have experienced this drive
towards generalized expansion, conquest, knowledge and faith, all inextri-
cable, which required the Universal as a guarantee of its legitimacy. The
European Middle Ages lived through the tumultuous struggle between
the Diverse and its constraining opposite, the struggle of particular beliefs
and universal belief, and, fighting against itself, let go (this is its suffering
and its victory, which is why it is fascinating) of the weave of illegitimate
diversity, the daring of fragmented knowledge, not total and systematic but
so totalizing and wandering.
 The Time of the Other 63

In times when writing conferred privilege on certain individuals, chosen

ones in chosen peoples, the writer was free to distance himself from the
world or the idea of the world. But it is true that today the very substance
of his work is expanded by that which constitutes it: the entanglement of
human communities and things and vegetation, the rocks and the clouds of
our universe. In solidarity and in solitude, he engages in the debate, from
the depths of his work. That is why in so many places people want to silence
writers. Banning their words (for all the sworn opponents of the existent) is
a way of deepening the shadow in the very darkness in this entanglement.
64 Treatise on the Whole-World

End-of-Century Rhetorics

The division of Western linear time into centuries has a specific

relevance. It becomes part of the unconscious of the peoples of this region
of our earth, it has entered into our common sensibility, it has imposed
itself everywhere, it has marked a rhythm.
It is part of the very principle of History. And even capable of swallowing
up, digesting perhaps, the intrusions of the histories of peoples, of forcibly
inscribing them into its linearity. There are only advantages in accepting
this linearity of time, whether it is determined on the basis of the birth of
Jesus Christ or the start of the Hegira or the first Jewish Passover.
But at the same time, to refuse or question this division into centuries
is already to challenge, perhaps without knowing or really wanting to, the
universalizing generalization of Judeo-Christian time. A role that has fallen
to diversifying thoughts, mad poets and heretical relativists.

In fact, if there is a feeling of unreality in contemporary Europe, just as

it tries to create itself, this is not because of the well-known torments that
one feels at the end of a century, but because of the enormous multiplicity
in which History is now going astray, and the pain caused by the lack of
power or control over this History, felt by those who had conceived it as an
origin projecting itself towards an end.

This was at stake in the systems of relation, so baroque and so precious,

decided not so long ago by European thinkers, between a diachrony posed
as a neutral movement (a History without flesh) and a synchrony placed
there as a time without object. These systems, which engendered rhetorics,
did not bear witness to a millennial fear, but, very subtly, to a consciousness
of the new multiplicity of the world and the nostalgia of no longer being
able to govern it, of no longer making History. These rhetorics are the
ingenious lasso or the rope that Western thought (at its most alert) has put
around the neck of History.

That is what they do. Relativize History, but without being willing to
accept the histories of peoples.

If the end of the century (and the end of this century) seems significant,
it is because at the same time, so to speak, it has kept its function as the
pendulum of linear time, but, already taken unawares by the multiplicity of
 The Time of the Other 65

times and histories that have risen up from the depths of the world and are
finally joining together, its significance is no longer so absolute.

‘We would also sing of what people said was the approaching end of the
century; and although we didn’t know which century or in relation to what,
we could feel that it referred to whole heap of time, an incalculable number
of harvests: this end surrounded us with a sadness full of strange bursts of
joy, of excitement at something beyond the end. We sang:

The end of the century is the end of poverty

The century and us we are undressed
A century is dead and buried
The Negro is a century and has lost his true self.

That was our way of marking the passage of time. Adoline too seemed
to be moving towards her end. She was more than a century that rolls
into decadence, she was a century full of its own fallen greenery. She was
falling, like the greenery of the country attacked by burnings and axes.
The country was growing less dark, like a shack whose walls of planks
let in bursts of the flower of sunlight at midday. We were going from the
civilization of the forest to the civilization of the savannah: at least that is
what we would have said if we had owned a little more land in a little more
time …’

(La case du commandeur)

Having thus considered that, in these countries where the gulfs of time
and the vertigo of collective memory give birth to so many cries, the rhythm
of our words perhaps follows the lines of a secret disorder, I have chosen to
summarize here some aspects of our oral rhetorics, in the provocative form
of the memorandum, the ultimate in writing.
66 Treatise on the Whole-World

Rhetorics of Orality, or Not

(Summary)

Introduction: What Orality Is Not

It is difficult to develop or explore a rhetoric, an art of speech and the

spoken word, when writing is today tempted, tormented, with the evident
but unclear passions of the oral.

It is not a question of a simple transition from the written to the oral,

as is sometimes said. Nor of knowing if one should replace texts conceived
for contemplation or meditation (for the ‘inner voice’, in some sense) with
texts of a different kind, constructed for declamation and hearing.

When we envisage the histories of human communities, we see that

they all involved the relay between the oral and the written, that is to
say, where writing appeared first as progress, then as transcendence. The
foundational books stand tall like monuments on the frontiers of these
countries where voices were gradually fixed onto concrete objects, tablets,
rocks, monuments and parchments. The Iliad and the Old Testament for
example bring together the tracks of the earlier oral traditions and fix them,
obliging the singer to repeat them in this fixed form.

It is a question of speculating, tentatively, as to whether this

transcendence in which writing had been established will now be
challenged. The languages and practices of orality have reappeared in the
panorama of literatures, they have begun to influence its sensibility with
flamboyant energy and presence. We must think, passionately, not how
to manage this transition, now from the written to the oral, but how
to encourage a renewed poetics where the oral would remain a force in
the written, and vice versa, and where the exchange between the spoken
languages of the world would burn brightly.

Such new kinds of poetics are not to be confused with the old dramatic
art or the tricks of ‘spoken’ writing. Writing in drama and the ‘spoken
language’ of novels are literary procedures, that question neither the nature
nor the status of the written.
 The Time of the Other 67

Moreover we must not accept the media effects of the audiovisual and
the written press. These effects use techniques – news flash, script, scenario,
short report – that claim to represent reality in an abbreviated form that is
almost always oversimplified. There is no orality there. There is nothing but
brief pieces of writing, arranged for recording or filming. Writing is never
fruitfully brief except when it inhabits or borders on silence, but without
disappearing. From the point of view of a rhetoric of writing, the brevity
of the audiovisual is always idle chatter.

It is also a way of playing tricks with the real: they try to capture what
is essential in reality and claim to describe it in its totality, whereas in
fact they have carefully chosen from it, isolated or readjusted something
that they will illustrate and present as permanent or definitive. If ‘repre-
sentation’ of the real is the law of the audiovisual, the mimesis here is
deceptive: it acts in a present time that is always fleeting. This helps us to
understand that the imitation of the real, one of the foundations of writing
in Western cultures, has to be re-examined.
And if the ‘duplication’ of the real is at the basis of the world of
computers, we must know or suspect all that such a redoubling opens up
in variations, beyond an elementary cloning that would have been without
echoes.

Orality, this passion of the peoples who in the twentieth century have
emerged into the visibility of the world, and in so far as it enters writing,
manifests itself first through the fruitful quarrels it introduces there,
multiplicity, circularity, repetitions, accumulation and irreligion. Relation
in fact.

It escapes from the systems of traditional rhetorics which always

supported a linearity or a unity of time and language.

1. Multiplicity, Circularity

The histories (that have emerged) of the peoples that are now visible dissipate
the linear harmony of time
It is not certain that in the world-totality the temporal linearity
consecrated by the expansion of Western cultures can be maintained as a
universal regulatio. At least on the level of the imagination.
68 Treatise on the Whole-World

In these circumstances, neither the ‘century’ nor its end any longer have any
normative value
One can imagine contemporary peoples who live different times and
who continue to be in action and reaction with other presences in the
Chaos-World. And who thereby express ‘ends’ that diverge from the
temporal norm accepted by everyone.
In this sense, and for our time, each year, each day, each minute can be
a century or the end of a century. And also each individual. This is summed
up in the Antillean proverb that says: ‘A Negro is a century’. Not so much
that he endures, or that his resentment is patient, as that he is impenetrable
and one cannot see through him.

The traditional rhetorics continue to be monolingual and unilateral

They cannot conceive of the diffractions of our times, or the distances
and vertiginous attractions between all given languages. They can conceive
of themselves only in the use of a single language, which has delimited its
periods in the linearity that we have said (before and after Jesus Christ).
But, oh Rabelais, oh Joyce, oh Pound, oh playful entanglements.

The non-hierarchical multiplicity of languages leads irreversibly to new

langages
The phenomena of creolization at work in our world concern not only
the diversity of times experienced by communities which may or may not
be in contact, but also the interchange of the written and spoken languages.
Beyond these languages, the imagination (or imaginations) of human
communities could inspire langages, or archipelagos of langages, which
would be the equivalent of the infinite variation of our relations. Language
is the ever shattered crucible of my unity. Langage would be the open field
of my Relation.
Transrhetorics, whose usages are not yet known to us.

End of Century or End of History?

Will the twentieth century really come to its end? Can we not rather
consider that what is endlessly ending for us is History, or rather the
philosophies of History, which have constructed normative linearity and
at the same time defined their own exclusive finality in the torment of
human times?
Transhistory is spreading.
 The Time of the Other 69

II. Accumulation and Irreligion

Orality Outside Transcendence

The transcendence of writing compared to orality, particularly in
Western cultures, is based on the ambiguity of the term Word, where one
cannot actually distinguish if it designates only the spoken word of God
or also the form of his written Law. Every case of the transcendence of
writing results from an absolute of Revelation. Of a primary Dictation, just
as determining as a Genesis.
Works of orality, especially when it is composite and not atavistic, are
woven in Relation. The Sacred for us perhaps comes from this Relation, no
longer from a Revelation or a Law.

Poetics of the Oral-Written

These do not constitute systems of rhetoric.
One could list their themes, without having to order them:
A poetics of duration, which does not ‘itemize’ the different times.
Piling up and accumulation, which take the word out of its linearity.
Return and repetition, which do not cheat the signified.
Rhythms of assonance, which weave the memory of our surroundings.
The obscure, which is the echo of the Chaos-World.

III. Poetics of Relation, Poetics of Chaos

Rhetoric and Identity.

Let us repeat that what we have discussed here is linked to the
conception that everyone has of his or her identity.
The Being-Root is exclusive, it does not enter into the infinite and
unpredictable variations of the Chaos-World, where only being-as-Relation
is active.
The traditional rhetorics could be seen as the glorious effort of the
Being-Root to confirm itself as Being.

Relation, Unpredictable, Cannot Conceive of Rhetoric.

Where the written associated itself with transcendence and tried to
illustrate Being, the oral-written-oral multiplies openness and traces its
70 Treatise on the Whole-World

path in the flaming impromptu of the world, which is the only form of its
permanence.

The Chaos-World, Unpredictable, Multiplies Rhetorics

Also, a system can be conceived in this context only if it ‘comprehends’
all envisageable rhetorics, and also all the possibilities of a non-universal-
izing trans-rhetoric.
The words of the Chaos-World do not presuppose any normative
generalization.
The burning light projects limitlessly.

And there, quite suddenly, the crazy arum lilies, the red gingers,
sculpted scentless flowers, steal from the Balata forest* its writing: the
muffled propagation of its sparkling incense.

* ‘Le Jardin de Balata’ is a well-known, partially ‘wild’, garden in Martinique.

 The Time of the Other 71

For baroque art, knowledge grows through extension, accumulation,

proliferation and repetition, and not above all through depths and dazzling
revelation. Baroque is usually of the order (or the disorder) of orality. In
the Americas it meets up with the ever-renewed beauty of hybridities and
creolizations, where the angels are Indian, the Virgin black, the cathedrals
like vegetation in stone, and this echoes the words of the story-teller which
also spread through the tropical night, accumulate and repeat. The story-
teller is Creole or Quechua, Navajo or Cajun. In the Americas, the baroque
is naturalized.
 • • •

Writing
Writing

To write is to say: the world.

The world as totality, which is so dangerously close to the totalitarian.

No science can give us a truly global opinion of it, can enable us to appre-
ciate its extraordinary hybridity, or can reveal to us how much living in it
changes us. Writing, which leads us to unpredictable intuitions, allows us
to discover the hidden constants of the world’s diversity, and we are happy
to feel how these invariables also speak to us.

This saying of writing, which thus brings us closer to such a knowledge,

also means that we can feel why it is the world as totality, and not an
exclusive, chosen or privileged part of the world, that transports us.
We discover that the place that we live in, that we speak from, can no
longer be separated from this mass of energy that calls to us in the distance.
We can no longer grasp its movement, its infinite variations, its sufferings
and its pleasures, unless we relate it to that which moves so totally for us,
in the totality of the world. The ‘exclusive part’ that would be our place,
we cannot express its exclusivity if we make of it an exclusion. We would
then have a totality that really did border on totalitarianism. But, instead
of that, we establish Relation.

And not by an abstraction, an idealization of everything, that would

have led us to see in our particular place a sort of reflection of a beneficial,
profitable universal. We have renounced that as well. The claim that one
has abstracted a universal from a particular no longer excites us. It is the
actual substance of each of the places, their minute or infinite detail and
the thrilling sum of their particularities, that is to be placed in complicity
with those of all places. To write is to summon up the savour of the world.
The idea of the world is no longer sufficient. A literature based on the
idea of the world may be skilful, ingenious, giving the impression of having
74 Treatise on the Whole-World

‘seen’ the totality (this is for example what in English is called ‘World
Literature’), but it will pontificate in non-places and be nothing but an
ingenious destructuring and a hasty recomposition. The idea of the world
takes advantage of the imagination of the world, the intertwined poetics
that allow me to sense how my place joins up with others, how without
moving it ventures elsewhere, and how it carries me along in this immobile
movement.

Writing is saying, literally.

The brilliance of the spoken word is the manifesto of all those peoples
who are suddenly clamouring to sing their languages, before they perhaps
disappear, worn out and erased by the international pidgins. The adventure
is beginning, for all these oral languages, that up to now have been despised
and dominated. Standardizations, transcriptions, with their traps that
must be avoided; but also, the inscription of these languages within a social
formation that perhaps tends, or is forced, to use what is called a major
language of communication, a dominant language. The diversity of the
world needs the languages of the world.
The brilliance of the oral literatures has thus come, not of course to
replace the written text, but to change its structure. Writing really is
saying: opening up to the world without dispersing or diluting oneself in it,
and without being afraid to use in writing those powers of orality that are
so much in accordance with the diversity of all things: repetition, accumu-
lation, circularity, the spiralling cry, the breaks in the voice.

In this new state of literature, the ancient and very fruitful division into
literary genres is perhaps no longer compulsory. What is a novel and what is
a poem? We no longer believe that narrative is the natural form of writing.
The story that one tells and controls used to be inherent to the History
that one makes and governs. The latter was the guarantee of the former,
for the peoples of the West, and the former was the legitimate celebration
of the latter. There is still some prestige attaching to this solidarity in the
popularity of fashionable novels, in Europe and the Americas. But we
are drawn to different forms. The explosion of the world-totality and the
rushing towards audiovisual or computerized techniques have opened the
field to an infinite variety of possible genres, of which we have as yet no
 Writing 75

idea. Meanwhile, the poetics of the world are gaily mixing up genres, thus
reinventing them. This means that our collective memory is prophetic: at
the same time as it assembles the given of the world, it tries to remove
from it the elements that encouraged hierarchy, the scale of values, a falsely
transparent universal. We know today that there is no model that works.

The poet, beyond the language that he uses, but mysteriously within
that very language, on the level of the language and in its margin, is a
builder of langage. The clever but mechanical game-playing of languages
may soon appear outdated, but not the work that churns away at the base
of langage. The poet attempts to rhizomatically connect his place to the
totality, to diffuse the totality into his place: permanence in the moment
and vice versa, the elsewhere in the here and vice versa. That is the small
amount of divination that he claims for himself, faced with the derelictions
of our reality. He does not play the game of the universal, which would not
be a way of establishing Relation. He always supposes, from the first word
of his poem: ‘I speak to you in your language, and I hear you in my langage’.
76 Treatise on the Whole-World

Towns, big villages of nothing! Real places of the All! Have you lost
your Xamaniers* and your arapes? The end of the evening, what is left of
its cloud, has run away over the acacias. Now it is late, you have no more
paths left to plough. Your daciers fight with your assembled Majors. Your
smoke becomes visible in the carobs as they grow cold. The storm has gone
up into the hills of your salènes. You mix up the words and the languages
and the echoes with the solidified mud of the huques. You create new ones.
It’s a langage, which infiltrates the grease of your roads, we hear it, we speak
it. You stay there, heavy with the weight of so many breaths. Without even
seeing that we grind your spelt flour on your rose bushes.

* The italicized words in this passage are words that Glissant has invented, as
he explains in a note at the end of the book.
 • • •

What Was Us, What Is Us

What Was Us, What Is Us

… The flames of the wild lilies, the bright thickets of birds of paradise,
the sleepy reddish houses looking out over marshes scattered with ginger
torches, and all the laughs and sorrows that the world-totality amasses in a
single favela, then the sands – Brazil – cascading down between the walls of
snaking rivers, and the cries of choirs from Africa mixing with the Indian
flute, from where the bossa nova will soon emerge, and the yapping of the
factories coming to lick the mosaics of the pavements, all these familiar
images that accumulate immeasurably, and the Amazonian peacocks that
engulf the families of the forest in the shadow of their spreading tails, and
the rough smell of the coconuts and the bitter oranges …
78 Treatise on the Whole-World

Folding and Unfolding

And for all your life you will descend this staircase
Michel Leiris, Aurora

Michel Leiris’s meticulous observation does not betoken a fragmented

vision of the real, but leads him to an accumulation of details (or of
episodes) that ultimately makes up a weave. This meticulousness responded
to an aspect of his character. Closed in on himself, cautious and perhaps
suffering from shyness, he made an effort to pay genuine and serious
attention to others and to the world. He read the real with a frenzied
or delighted determination, because he distrusted his natural absent-
mindedness or his egotism. And what he thus read, he balanced with his
understanding of himself, seeking a correlation between self and other.
It all came back to the individual Michel Leiris, but through modesty,
through a fear of creating or seemingly wanting to impose established or
definitive truths.

The real is a totality which is forever weaving itself. Michel Leiris’s

passion will be to decipher this weave and to give it a poetic equivalent, but
not for just anyone: in every corner where he had a chance of coming upon
himself, everywhere he would find himself implicated in the Other, every
word that would activate this relationship.

In one of his first books, Aurora (‘I was not yet thirty when I wrote
Aurora …’), Leiris shows this kind of to-and-fro, emphasizing for example
this:

The death of the world equates with the death of myself, no adherent
of a cult of unhappiness will make me reject this equation, the sole
truth that dares claim my agreement, even though contradictorily I
occasionally sense everything that the word HE may hold for me in
vague punishments and monstrous threats (p. 40)*

* The quotations all relate to the re-edition of Aurora in the collection

L’Imaginaire (Gallimard, 1977).
 What Was Us, What Is Us 79

The real is a body of meanderings and life throbs in every corner of

it. The real and life make up the folding. Considering them together
comes down to building a rhetoric, by a slow work of unfolding that aims
to enlighten rather than to convince, to persuade oneself rather than
confusing the reader – the mute confident – with an excess of reasons.

The same approach governs observation, or vision, in L’Afrique fantôme.

Although the book’s title constitutes a presupposition (it is Leiris who is
the ‘fantom’, searching in vain for himself), the material that fills it does
not consist of theoretical suppositions. A rigorous observer, and one who
imposes on himself the most formal objectivity in his notation, Leiris
nevertheless puts into practice, on occasion, this sustained relationship
between subjectivity and the real that will be the basis for his life’s work.

Scrupulous objectivity, which is the rule of the profession. Subjectivity,

which enters into ethnographic thinking. The relation to the other (or at
least the anxious search for it), which is an implication of modesty. The
determination not to conclude with generalizing theory.

We might add suspense, that way of leaving his conclusions until later
but picking up yesterday’s detail or episode, and imperceptibly adding to it.
The weave. Suspense will be one of the features of the art of Leiris’s writing
prose, a suspense that is not frivolous but is repeated as part of the spatial
expanse and the duration of the writing.

This was the period when a conception of ‘pure’ ethnology was being
elaborated: the attempt to discover, based on the model of societies that
were also assumed to be pure, or at least less complex (which was in itself
a strange prejudice), the elementary structures or dynamics of any given
society. The claims of this dominant ethnology were once again based
on objectivity, but in the sense of a will or belief that one can contain
the essence of a social or cultural fact in the mesh of the descriptions;
on distancing, whereby one hoped to guarantee objectivity; on definition,
which presupposes that the observed phenomenon has been completely
understood, in addition to its exemplarity. Leiris does not subscribe to this
temptation of the generalizing universal.

*
80 Treatise on the Whole-World

His most significant work in this instance is Contacts de civilisations en

Guadeloupe et en Martinique, a book which is not much discussed, for good
reason: how does one assess this punctilious accumulation of facts, which
does not lead on to foundational theories but leaves in its raw state the real
that it has uncovered, content just to weave in its mass? Leiris as ethnog-
rapher, in the pragmatic, humble way that typified his approach to things
and people, here accepts the analytical schemas common to anthropology
and sociology: the study of social classes and levels of langage, the exami-
nation of historical ‘formations’. But one soon realizes that, faced with the
complex reality of the French-speaking Antilles, composite Creole societies,
what retains his attention is not the subject matter (to be discovered or
‘understood’) of this reality, but first and foremost the complexity itself as
subject matter. We are fully within an ethnology of Relation, an ethnog-
raphy of the relation to the Other.
To study contacts between cultures means one has already decided
that there is no lesson to be learnt from them, since the nature of such
contacts is to be fluid and unexpected. We would also say (linking the
quality of this observed reality, or of the account that is given of it, to the
observer himself), that Leiris did not intend to draw any conclusion from
his self-analysis, other than to envisage day after day that other conclusion,
which is also a suspension, and which he was obsessed by: the moment of
his death. Not death as possible fear (such as Montaigne tried to remedy
in advance) but death as a mystery or scandal ending another scandal or
mystery, that of life. ‘Night and day death hung over me like a dismal
threat’ (p. 84).

If the observation of the real and the confession of oneself do not aim
to uncover the basic reality of things, what is the point of them? As far as
ethnography is concerned, it is a question of describing honestly in order
to better establish a connection, to better found the exchange. As for the
confession, or let’s say the confidence, we are so enmeshed in the tissue
of the work that we do not notice one of its obvious features: that Leiris
does not really inform us of the elements of his life – the women he has
desired, the resentments he has experienced, the lacks he suffers – except
in a secondary and in some sense illusory fashion.
Confession in his case has nothing in common with how we understand
it in Rousseau for example: an exaltation of the ego, the justification of an
 What Was Us, What Is Us 81

existence and a way of thinking. Nor does it correspond to the search for
an indubitable truth.

It is this same pitiless demand for truth (for veracity) in detail that is
imposed here (for confession) and there (for the practice of ethnography).
The attention with which Leiris observes the world is governed by the
all-powerful nature of this veracity, more difficult to achieve in the case of
confession. For Leiris, the most demanding element is the eye. Not only
the eye that sees in the present, but also the eye of memory, which hears
words coming from so far away, tormenting expressions, tunes, proverbs,
common places.

Thus we discover the principle, which we had struggled to seize, of

confession for Leiris: to contribute to the weave of a rhetoric that is alone
capable (establishing a relationship between living and saying) of providing
an excuse for the scandal of the human condition, in other words, of his
condition. ‘We do not arrive on earth with impunity and any kind of escape
is impossible’ (p. 58).

The demand for truth comes before everything else. If the elements
that are linked together in the poetics, the words, the expressions, these
proverbs, these tunes, from which the author ‘starts’, or the events that he
‘uses’, had first been deformed or fantasized by him, then the link between
the condition and its expression, the weave of the real and the weave of
saying, would have been broken. And if one merged together these two
dimensions, of living and saying, without bringing to them the ardent
work of the weaving of writing, then one would again come up against this
scandal of the human condition, without being able to ward it off. The
conspiratorial artifice of art is not – how simple that would be! – to bring
the veracity of facts into the circle of our subjectivity, but to reveal the link,
if there is one, woven between the latter and the former. It is with this ‘if
there is one’ that rhetoric begins and writing runs its risk. Poetic art, the
only imaginable form of ‘exploration’, is a phase of the possible.

In doing this, Michel Leiris is in no way either essentialist or nominalist.

He does not intend to define. And the link between the inconceivable
system of existence and the deliberate system of expression is neither fusion
82 Treatise on the Whole-World

nor confusion. The meticulous eye is an eye that listens, oh Claudel,* and
speaks. The confession is first of all a discourse, where wordplay, and the
games of words, combine within each other. One could sum up the process
like this: what existence has spread all around, discourse organizes. Or
better: what the folding has concealed, poetics unfolds. From folding to
unfolding, the movement is unceasing.
This to-and-fro also concerns objects, which are active witnesses and
highly significant particles of the weave: ‘Such a series of objects, spaced
out like a flux, must necessarily see another series following it as its reflux’
(p. 62). Leiris shares, but also goes beyond, the surrealists’ passion for bric-
à-brac, for the chance encounter of strange chosen objects, whose listing
(the poetic argument of the exploration of the real) proceeds from the
‘there is …’ of Guillaume Apollinaire.** For Leiris, such lists are reversible,
reciprocally contaminating. Folding-unfolding.

When we say ‘rhetoric’, we do not mean a body of precepts cleverly

activated nor a didactic ruse, but an adventurous dynamic of the
word, a gamble laid bare, in the relation of outside-inside, self-world,
existence-expression.
Leiris’s prose is thus a meta-prose which at every moment evaluates its
own level of expressibility (in those moments where the author ‘confesses’
the facts) and its levels of reflexibility, when the same author compares his
confession to the equivalence that we have stated, from the Haut mal of life
to the Frêle bruit of writing.

The complex stages of contamination, for example semantic, gradually

tie the knot of the sentence, as in Aurora where the name of the heroine
inaugurates a procession of derived meanings, OR AURA, OR AUX
RATS, HORRORA, O’RORA, and where Leiris writes this, which
prefigures many of the sequences in La règle du jeu:

I reflected on what I had seen and, looking above the shed that had
been turned into a mass grave towards the Polar star vaguely shining

* Paul Claudel (1868–1955, French poet and dramatist, whose work reflected
his Catholicism.
** Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), French poet, forerunner of Surrealism.
 What Was Us, What Is Us 83

like the ironic point of Paracelsus’s sword, I thought about the name
Aurora, attached to the fate of that extraordinary girl whom the last
fragments of clouds were now carrying towards a skyscraper built -
with what everlasting cement? – on the edge of a continent that is
extraordinarily stable and clear but also smoky, and I remembered
that in Latin the word ‘hora’ means ‘hour’, that the root or appears in
os, oris which means ‘mouth’ or ‘orifice’, that it was on Mount Ararat
that the ark came to rest at the end of the flood, and finally that if
Gérard Nerval* hanged himself one night in an obscure alleyway in
the centre of Paris, it was because of two semi-ghostlike creatures
who each bore one half of this name: Aurélia and Pandora. (p. 178)

These contaminations, along with many others, for example geographical

ones (collusions between places), and always induced by the supra-logical
mysteries of semantics, and many other kinds of transversalities, are
explicitly related to the procedures of alchemy and transmutation: from
existence to speech, from death-life to rhetoric, which alone excuses it and
allows one to endure it.
Leiris’s prose is a single long breathlessness, a crosshatching of breaths,
strong or restrained, as of someone who, half suffocating, sees a mawkish
apocalypse coming and tries to take its measure.

Already in Aurora, the evocation of the state that for Leiris was
boredom, which is neither spleen nor melancholy, and which he admitted
to feeling, to the friends who visited him in the final days of his life. He
is bored when he is not pursuing the correlation between the refolding of
existence and the unfolding of writing. I do not conclude that he lived in
order to write, but certainly that writing did not satisfy him when he could
not find in it material to support life. Boredom is that gaping hole that
sometimes, in the open break between living and writing, spreads forth its
gloomy indifference.
Thus he contrasted the shapeless mass of the lived with the rhythmical
rigour of the rhetorical weave. Aurora tells us this, in its provocative and
exaggerated manner:

* Gérard Nerval (1808–1855), French Romantic poet.

84 Treatise on the Whole-World

For I must say that I have always associated life with what is
sluggish, lukewarm and disproportionate. Liking only what is intan-
gible, what is outside life, I arbitrarily identified everything hard,
cold, or geometrical with that invariant, and that is why I like the
angular lines that the eye projects into the sky to grasp the constel-
lations, the mysteriously premeditated structure of a monument, and
finally the ground itself, the site par excellence of all figures. (p. 82)

We know that, beyond this passion for geometrical figures, maps and
topographical documents, so distant from what one would call the human,
the work of Michel Leiris is an obstinate search for the only kind of weave
that holds together, that which establishes a relation and enables us to
overcome the sluggish, the lukewarm and the disproportionate, by lucid
solidarity.

The final word of his rhetoric, having passed through the deferment of
the real and the shifting of writing, indicates a true – liberated – relation
to the Other.
 What Was Us, What Is Us 85

The earth womb of the Caribbean countries, Haiti.

Who can never stop paying for her audacity in conceiving and raising
up the first Negro nation in the world of colonization.
Who for two hundred years has felt what Blockade means, renewed
each time.
Who suffers without respite her encampments and her mad sea, and
grows in our imaginations.
Who has sold her Creole blood for half a dollar per litre.
Who has in turn distributed herself in the Americas, the Caribbean,
Europe and Africa, remaking the diaspora.
Who has used up all her wood, marking her hills with arid wounds.
Who has founded a Painting and invented a Religion.
Who is always dying in the fighting between her black elites and her
mulatto elites, both equally predatory.
Who has carried along beautiful or terrible words, the word macoute,
the word lavalass, the word déchouquer.
86 Treatise on the Whole-World

The drum of the Whole beats in the poetry of Aimé Césaire:

Je me suis, je me suis élargi – comme le monde –
Et ma conscience plus large que la mer!
J’éclate. Je suis le feu, je suis la mer.
Le monde se défait. Mais je suis le monde.*
And flows in muffled surprises in the art of Saint-John Perse:
Et la mer à la ronde roule son bruit de crânes sur les grèves,
Et que toutes choses au monde lui soient vaines, c’est ce qu’un soir, au bord
du monde, nous contèrent
Les milices du vent dans les sables d’exil …**
Has it not been said, of this poet, that he went from the heartbeat of the
Caribbean (Éloges) to the swell of the Pacific mixed with the High Plateaux
of Asia (Anabase) to the misty spray of the Atlantic (Exil)? The seas flow in
this wandering like abandoned rivers.

* ‘I have, I have enlarged myself – like the world – And my consciousness larger
than the sea! I burst open. I am the fire, I am the sea. The world falls apart. But
I am the world’.
** ‘And the sea all around rolls its noise of skulls on the shore, and its indifference
to everything in the world is what, one evening, on the edge of the world, we were
told by the militias of the wind in the sands of exile …’
 What Was Us, What Is Us 87

The body of Douve

When Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve appeared,* there was

quite a large group of us, poets living in France, of more or less the same
age, who were interested in a broadening of poetic discourse, either on the
horizons of a country and the world, in the case of Kateb Yacine, or in the
exhalations of the stanza, considered as a measure of the human breath
and a crucible of the noise of the world, as had been illustrated in turn by
Segalen, Claudel and Saint-John Perse.

It would perhaps make a small contribution to the literary history of

this period to show how this category of poets, whom nothing in fact
‘brought together’ – neither school nor theory nor manifesto – reacted
to Douve. Among them, Jacques Charpier, whose poem Connaissez-vous
l’Écolière was popular with us, Jean Laude who was to become a specialist
in the detailed history of African Art and a poet whose ample darkness
diffused whorls of patient light, and Roger Giroux whose first book of
poetry, L’Arbre le temps, would later be published in the same edition of
Mercure de France in which Douve appeared.
In some sense, poets involved with History, either because they had
suffered its effects and challenged it (Yacine) or because they reflected on
its contradictory meanings (Laude, Charpier). Or else, in the case of Roger
Giroux or Paul Mayer, convinced by the same passion for rhetoric, in the
writing sense of the word, which was the opposite of that absence, that
sparseness of the word on the page that was beginning to take over poetic
expression in France. And yet Giroux, a major poet, would later on incline
more towards this silence, where nevertheless I can point to the breaks in
his old way of writing. Pierre Oster held himself aloof. Jean Grosjean, even
more distant, paced out his prophetic countryside.

Douve was far away from us, but totally present.

In the first place because of its dialectic – let’s not be afraid of this word.
The poet invites us to consider it, quoting Hegel as an epigraph to his text:
‘But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself
untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself
in it.’

* Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve, Yves Bonnefoy, 1953.

88 Treatise on the Whole-World

The quotation appealed to the Hegelians that most of us were or wanted

to be, and yet it contained a first, and very fleeting, ambiguity. It became
easy to conceive of movement as life and to equate immobility with death.
The text of the poem soon urged us to distance ourselves from such a crude
mechanism.
Douve appealed to us as the first text by a poet of our generation who
stated without stating that poetry is knowledge, even if this knowledge
comes through what Bonnefoy would later call the improbable.
I think it was also the first book of contemporary poetry that we had
regarded as being both total and so untotalitarian, and it was clear to us
that the body of Douve, object of poetry, obscure and luminous, divided
but always reconstituted, revealed itself as one and as transfigured by the
multiplicity that ran through it.

Reading the poem, one could not help but return constantly to that
shattered multiplicity of the body of Douve. I say the body, since Douve,
who promises knowledge, does not offer herself under the auspices of pure
evanescence. She is a secret knowledge torn apart, and which breaks, these
are quotations from the poem, who sees her eyes corrupted, who is flooded
with ‘cold heads with beaks and jaws’.
Such distributions of the body of Douve lead one to think that she
extends herself in the earth with a terrible impatience.
I came back to the book, where the image of this space was gradually
woven together, this extension that was like an exploration both of oneself
and outside oneself.
In order to recompose one of the fields, no, one of the directions, among
others, I could see, let’s say that I recognized, the coal, the charred land
whose dead body carries and supports life, the sand, whose mobility is
forever fixed, the spider’s web, which is like sand taking on a shape, the ivy,
canvas and sand and vegetal coal, and the luxuriant grass, which combines
in its eagerness all life and all death.
An impressive variety, from coal to grass, a diversity that conforms to
itself. All realities at the same time dense and woven. We understood why
Douve was obscure and luminous, one and transfigured. It is because she
did not think of herself as being exempt from the assaults of the earth, that
she was truly telluric. To receive the blows of flint or thunder, to be in the
grip of cold and shadow, made of her a very pure present. The knowledge
that the poem offered passed through this unprotesting energy, which
foreshadowed our own questions.
 What Was Us, What Is Us 89

The text proudly refused to specify its circumstances. But one could
follow the movement not of Douve but of the poet. He went from a
multiple past:
Je te voyais courir sur les terrasses
Je te voyais lutter contre le vent …
Towards an ineluctable present, or presents:
Je me réveille, il pleut. Le vent te pénètre, Douve, lande résineuse endormie
près de moi …
Was this not, way beyond time, the mark of a consciousness which, let’s
put it like this, makes itself History? And also, of an attempt to open up
the thickness of the world? This poetry led to the meditation of Being, but
through teaching the most insistent elements of the real.

Le ravin pénètre dans la bouche maintenant

Les cinq doigts se dispersent en hasards maintenant
La tête première coule entre les herbes maintenant
La gorge se farde de neige et de loups maintenant
Les yeux ventent sur quels passagers de la mort et c’est nous dans ce vent
dans cette eau dans ce froid maintenant
A measured prosody, nothing superfluous or affected, a kind of severity
of inspiration that would exclude the feeble exaltations that had previously
excited the poem in France. But also, brusque rhythms, breaks, and often
circularities where the poem rolls back on itself, turning it into a single
river, a current that flowed from a quasi legendary past to this present time,
struck with multiple splendour.

And, as though to pre-empt our surprise, the poet projected into the
future what I can only, at this point in his meditation, call an Art poétique:
this is the poem, prefiguring the poem as a whole, that he titles Vrai nom,
and that I consider to be one of the most beautiful impulses of contem-
porary French poetry:

Je nommerai désert ce château que tu fus

Nuit cette voix, absence ton visage
Et quand tu tomberas dans la terre stérile
Je nommerais néant l’éclair qui t’a porté.

It is one of the truths of poetry that an Art poétique is always in the

future, always marked with the sign of that which is to come. It is a promise
by the poet, and it seems to me that Bonnefoy, in Hier régnant désert for
90 Treatise on the Whole-World

example, has kept that promise. But also future in the sense that improb-
ability devours the promise, and the unfinished never exhausts it.
The fire, the spirit, that shines darkly in Douve, we can if we want carry
them deep within us, or on the contrary expose them to the wind of the
world: in both cases they continue to burn and to achieve.
This is because the quivering weight of the presence and the obstinate
elevation of thought are one and the same thing.
Que j’aime qui s’accorde aux astres par l’inerte
Masse de tout son corps,
Que j’aime qui attend l’heure de sa victoire,
Et qui retient son souffle et tient au sol.*

I have not spoken about death at all. Its dialectic had seemed to
disappear beneath the body of the poem, the body of Douve. But it was this
very promise of life, expressed so logically by Hegel, brought to fruition by
Valéry in Le Cimetière marin, that was struck down and brought back to
life in Douve, who illuminates it with so many radiant obscurities.

* Literal translations of the quotations from the poem are as follows: ‘I saw you
run on the terraces, I saw you struggle against the wind …’; ‘I wake up, it’s raining.
The wind penetrates you, Douve, resinous moor sleeping beside me …’; ‘The ravine
enters the mouth now, the five fingers disperse in chances now, the head flows first
between the grasses now, the gorge is decorated with snow and wolves now, the
eyes blow on such passengers of death and it’s us in this wind in this water in this
cold now’; ‘I will name this castle that you were a desert, night that voice, absence
your face, and when you fall into the sterile earth I will name nothingness the
lightning that carried you there’; ‘How I love him who reaches out to the stars
with the inert mass of his whole body, how I love him who awaits the hour of his
victory, and holds his breath and clings to the ground’.
 What Was Us, What Is Us 91

The tragic roughness of Kateb Yacine’s work, the obstinate perseverance

of his existence, have made him into a tormented, secret and luminous
figure. He was never lost on the sidelines.*

* Kateb Yacine (1929–1989), Algerian poet and novelist who worked to promote
the cause of the Berber people.
92 Treatise on the Whole-World

Mandela’s Time
There are some times that are preserved, others that fade away. Nelson
Mandela’s time victoriously covered the coming of apartheid, the absolute
system of horror, accentuated by its official title of ‘separate development’.
Absolute? Because the system was complete, everyday, both savage and
petty, completely closed. In his autobiography Nelson Mandela says of it:
‘The often haphazard segregation of the past three hundred years was to
be consolidated into a monolithic system that was diabolical in its detail,
inescapable in its reach and overwhelming in its power’.* And he describes
this daily life: ‘It was a crime to walk through a Whites Only door, a
crime to ride a Whites Only bus, a crime to use a Whites Only drinking
fountain, a crime to walk on a Whites Only beach, a crime to be on the
streets after 11pm, a crime not to have a pass book and a crime to have
the wrong signature in that book, a crime to be unemployed and a crime
to be employed in the wrong place, a crime to live in certain places and a
crime to have no place to live’ (op. cit. vol. 1, p. 212). Without counting the
desolate towns, those townships of mud and dust, usually without water or
electricity or hygiene services; sordid conditions of existence, of health, of
education, and this in one of the richest countries of the world (one thinks
of the destitution of Zaïre, perched on so many underground resources),
whose strategic importance is such that it seemed as though no help could
have come from anywhere to overthrow this order of madness.

What has struck the imagination of the peoples of the earth: that in
one life a man should have lived these irreconcilable, mutually inconceivable
moments. The time when a little African boy is born in a tiny village in
the Transkei, with no chance of escaping from the circuit of dependency
and non-existence, the time when a militant is imprisoned for what seems
to be an eternity, and the time when this same Rolihlahla (‘He who creates
problems’) Mandela, who was given the Christian name Nelson, became –
in April 1994 – president of the Republic of South Africa. He who has
traversed this untrodden path seems to have had profound relations of
complicity with Time.

* Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom [1994], (London: Abacus, 2002),

vol. 1, p. 159.
 What Was Us, What Is Us 93

As though some Power had kept him apart from the passing days until
he, Mandela, was truly ready for another task, decided by the victorious
struggle of the South African people. As if he had been kept in reserve,
preserved (for twenty-five years of militant struggle, underground actions,
experience of armed struggle, and for twenty-seven more years of prison,
which was no less dangerous) for this moment when the world, in turn,
would be ready to accept and to demand that this task should finally
become concrete: a non-racial democracy, which the ANC had advocated
from the start, and which for a long time had seemed, to both actors and
spectators in this drama, to be an unrealizable dream.

Nelson Mandela sensed that he could have an influence on the passage

of time, at the cost of so much suffering. ‘In prison the minutes can seem
like years, but the years go by like minutes. An afternoon pounding rocks
in the courtyard might seem like forever, but suddenly it is the end of the
year, and you do not know where all the months went’ (op. cit. vol 2 p. 85.).
Was he perhaps chosen by destiny (and can we believe in destiny?), he who
survived where so many others, whom he names and honours in his work,
have perished?

But he is, as he makes clear all along, a militant of the ANC, careful to
respect the discipline of his party (in spite of a few lapses in the past, due
to the enthusiasm of youth), faithful, obeying the decisions of the majority.
It is all the more surprising to learn how in the final years of his
detention (about 1988–1989), when he is for the first time completely
isolated from his companions, he dares to try to make contact with the
government of Botha and then De Klerk, and tries hard to defend his point
of view to the dispersed leadership of the ANC. His unfailing solidarity
with Oliver Tambo who was at the time directing the organization from
the outside (from Lusaka, in Zambia), and with Walter Sisulu, who for
twenty years had been his companion in prison, probably facilitated the new
direction taken by the ANC at this time. Nevertheless Nelson Mandela’s
almost solitary initiative seems to have been decisive. The thousands and
thousands of deaths of members of the ANC and the other anti-apartheid
organizations, the Blacks, Indians, Coloureds, Zulus and Whites who had
supported their struggle and participated in it, had made it possible to win
this war. Mandela’s time is the time of the South African people.
94 Treatise on the Whole-World

This time leads to liberation (‘The Whites in this country cannot go

on being so blinded … I always knew I would get out of prison’ op. cit.
vol. 2, p. 279), passing on the way through days and years: his youth in the
landscape of the Transkei, the rituals of the Themba royal family (including
a remarkable scene of circumcision), his difficult adolescence, the lawyers’
firm opened in Johannesburg with Oliver Tambo (the first black lawyers’
firm in South Africa), the daily experience of apartheid, membership of the
ANC, mass struggles, arrests and trials, working underground, organizing
the armed struggle, the enormous stretch of time, as though autonomous
and singular, in prison, Soweto, the ANC’s decision to make the prisoner
Mandela a symbol, liberation, the elections, and victory.

Three-quarters of a century without any respite, punctuated by so much

distress, death, suffering, joyfulness and hope. Narrated with the precision
and humour of the African griot. Read how he describes Mrs Margaret
Thatcher, lecturing him and telling him to cut down – ‘at his age’ – on
his schedule of engagements, while he was on the world tour that followed
his liberation. Mrs Thatcher was amazed that Mandela had such a heavy
timetable.

And an unpretentious wisdom that resonates in simple statements: ‘The

curious beauty of African music is that it uplifts even as it tells a sad tale’
(op. cit. vol. 2 p. 255).

Now President, the person who is in charge of business. One of the

most decided, and decisive, men of Africa. Seeing him on the world’s
television screens, I have the feeling that he is keeping his distance, he who
has intervened so much in reality. It is as though he is returning from a
vertigo of time that has left absence on his face and has inclined him to
a haughty and familiar good naturedness, with which he considers every-
thing and everyone.
 What Was Us, What Is Us 95

He has renounced nothing of his Themba and Xhosa roots, he is

nostalgic for the country of his childhood, and he is also convinced that
South African society can only be multiracial. The two feelings are not
contradictory. It is not necessary to reject oneself in order to open up to
the other. Fellow citizens can be different, without having to ‘integrate’ in
order to work together, live together. From this the Nation takes on a new
meaning.
Nelson Mandela is also discreetly capitalist in his opinions, but never
anticommunist (it is a peculiarity of South African politics that the leaders
of the Communist Party could have been members of the ANC or its
leadership, without the two organizations merging together). He is happy
to say that he is an Anglophile and to confide that he loves the films of
Sophia Loren. A man who is free and diverse in his unity as a man.

The leaders of South Africa, who will have to satisfy the claims of so
many dispossessed people and who will find themselves the target of the
traps of international politics from which they will be able to extricate
themselves, devote themselves to working for reconciliation in the country.
(But it is said that criminality there is one of the highest in the world, that
corruption is running wild, that the power of the Whites under apartheid
has hardly been touched, and people are already shocked at the extent,
in this fight against atrocity, of the atrocities committed in the name of
the ANC.) If they succeed in this, they will have opened the twenty-first
century with a worldwide burst of action and a promise of equilibrium. The
Diversity of the world needs the South African experience, its success and
what it can teach us.

Distant presence of this time of Mandela. Those of us who were young

have grown up, we have gone from one project to another, we have achieved
or not achieved our existences, we have watched mornings rise over the
horizon of the sea, we have traversed the paths of our works, defended our
causes, our children were there, we have discovered the world-totality and
found ourselves deeply changed by it, and in the distance this presence has
always remained intact in the movement of everything.
96 Treatise on the Whole-World

It had seemed to us that we had not recognized the slow, patient

mission of Mahatma Gandhi until the moment he fell under the assassin’s
bullets. That we had hardly heard of Martin Luther King when he too
was killed. That the destiny of Che Guevara had run its course before he
contributed so greatly to changing our sensibilities. As if for us, spectators
of the world’s drama, these figures belonged to death, when it is life itself
that gives itself up to be reborn in other lives.
But we felt Mandela’s time growing in the distance. A time that involved
both the instant and duration. (It was like a heavy, round, full time, waiting
to unleash itself. We can compare it to the time of Yasser Arafat, equally
indefatigable, who seems for such a long time not to have completed his
work and to be lost in the infinity of the sands of Gaza.) And when the
elections brought him to the Presidency of his country, it was as though the
door of the Sun, white and black and red and yellow in the early morning,
had opened onto the future of the world. We could then be sure that
Mandela’s time had always been in contact with ours. Through all these
times that cross and navigate our waves and our backwashes like the skiffs
and fishing boats of the wind, he had kept himself ready to let us know
finally that nothing of the unpredictability of the world is impossible in
future.
 What Was Us, What Is Us 97

We think of the West (in the West) as the place of the Rights of Man,
of freedom of judgement, which we like to contrast with the fantastical
rigidity of Islam. What stupidity. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all share
the same spirituality of the One and the same belief in a revealed Truth.
Three monotheistic religions, which grew up around the Mediterranean
basin and which have all three engendered absolutes of spirituality and
heights of exclusion, elevations of supreme intensity, and, equally, the same
fundamentalisms, each in turn exacerbated. In this sense, Islam is one of
the remarkable components of the West that has spread across the world,
exactly as the Christian kingdoms did, even if it was in different ways. The
thought of the One, which has brought such greatness, has also distorted
so much. How can we accept this thinking, which transfigures, without
thereby offending against or turning away from the Diverse? For it is
diversity that protects us and, perhaps, allows us to continue.
98 Treatise on the Whole-World

The Book of the World.

The book is threatened with physical disappearance (this is one of our
best-known common places), for all sorts of reasons which come down to
this: the advances of the audiovisual and of computerization are unstop-
pable and fiercely discriminatory. That is what people say.
The time has passed in which we could dream of or design the world
as a totality but a conceivable one, one whose future development we could
conceptualize as a desirable harmony. The future development that we can
conceive of now is that of the unfinishable. We are forever being seduced by
the unpredictable and the discontinuous. All published books are judged by
what will be the next one to appear, by what its form will be, or by being
projected into the space of our thought like a virtual reincarnation.

Towards the end of his life Stéphane Mallarmé,* piling up notes,

corrections and documents to this end, wanted to accomplish the Book
that would finally mean everything and transcend everything. But in
Mallarmé’s time the world in itself had already begun to carry out its
ramblings; it was already combatting that purification of knowledge that
he wanted - that quest for essence - with an irreducible diversity, which
elsewhere Victor Segalen was to establish as a principle of poetics.
They both shared a similar Intention, which was to posit a Measure
against the immeasurable, a rhythm of knowledge against all the unknowable
in the world, and to contain this disorder and this multiplicity by the
rhetorical regulations that they had at their disposition.
But the world had moved further on, as world and as totality. It is as
though these poets had guessed from above or through vertigo the bewil-
dering jumble of this diversity: Mallarmé as dreamer of Being, Segalen
troubled by being, fragile, caught up in its unpredictability.
And if Mallarmé had realized his Book, which would have been the
Book of the world, then any kind of book would have vanished from our
horizons, both as project and as object.

The unpredictable and the discontinuous delight us, even though we are
afraid to accustom ourselves to their spiral. If the techniques of the visual,

* Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), symbolist poet.

 What Was Us, What Is Us 99

of computing and of orality are changing the substance of books, even if

they replace them with strange objects that we cannot imagine, if they
transform libraries into something quite different from media centres, even
if they push traditional books – i.e. those that have not been filmed - back
into their depths, where they must be explored at length, does it necessarily
mean that this filming has broken their spell or dimmed their brightness?
Does the transparency of the screen not equate to the thickness of the
page? And will we not get used to these strange objects?

Let us say this: the internet, which we choose as symbol and model for
the moment, throws us right into the unfurling of our world-totality, and
it would seem, even if we can click back onto a previous subject, that we
cannot step twice into the same water, that the literality of the world is for
us both actuality and fleetingness, that we cannot keep hold of anything
that would anchor us, in this perpetual current. Or else must we also learn
how to learn without holding onto anything?

You will object that the internet is more like a stock, an accumulation,
than a flow of water. This is true. But the way we use it determines its
characteristics. When we consult it, we are always moving. If the classical
sciences worked on the infinitely small and the infinitely large, we sense
that computer science (it already exists) considers only that which is
infinitely moving.

The book, as project and object, allows me to gamble on finding every

time that same water on my skin. Its current brings me to the spring and
the delta, its beginning and its end, and in any case however many pages I
want at the same time, it leaves me free to imagine them all together: what
it stretches out between its banks is a proof of its permanence. Or else,
should we learn to discover permanence, or at least the taste for perma-
nence, in the unceasing movement of the literal? I would put it like this:
the internet unfolds the world, it offers it in all its weight, while the book
illuminates and delivers its invariants.

Why should I still connect myself to invariants? Is this not the appro-
priate disguise that the old phantom of the absolute would choose to clothe
itself in? Is the literal reality of the Chaos-world not sufficient to satisfy all
100 Treatise on the Whole-World

fantasies, desires or aspirations? To be delirious in delirium, carnivalesque

in carnivals, savage in savagery? But even if I accustom my sensibility to the
unexpectedness of the Chaos-world, and accept that I should no longer try
to plan it or predict it in order to rule it, the fact remains that I will not be
able to accompany it in its course if I am totally carried away by it. Someone
caught up in a maelstrom can neither see nor think about the maelstrom.
This is why an art based on literalness, an elementarism or a realism, would
not put me in a position to experience the world, to approach it or to know
it; it would allow me only to passively undergo it.

The invariant is very similar to what we have said about the common
place: a place in which one thought of the world meets another thought of
the world. Focal points in the turbulence, that enable me to dominate or
tame my anxiety, my present fear, my vertigo.

The immeasurability of the world can be explored through the immeas-

urability of the text, and it is by revealing the invariants of the former, the
fleeting encounters, the relevances of the relations, what brings together
the silences and the bursts of noise, that the latter does more than drearily
reproduce it literally.

The thrust of the invariants does not found an Absolute, it establishes

Relation. Between here and elsewhere, inside and outside, myself and the
other, clay and granite. In this weave the poet inscribes his intention, the
pursuit of the poem or the phases of its recital. The book is a crucible in
which all this is transmuted. It allows for stopping, for the foundation of
the present time, for populating, through the divination of the invariants
and the fulfilment of the intention. It de-literalizes the immeasurability of
the world, but without losing its impact or trying to neutralize it.

Our practice or our sharing of languages passes through so many

experiences of the everyday, so many chance contacts, so many illumi-
nations immediately reduced to a fleeting gleam of light. But the text
preserved as a book gives us the poetic leisure to entrust to it our langage,
even if this has been forged in orality.
The use of languages suits the table of the internet. The alchemy of
langage requires this crucible of the book, even though we hastily throw
 What Was Us, What Is Us 101

into it materials that we hope will be transsubstantiated. The speed and

the fulguration proper to the book are not the same as those that carry us
away when we are in front of the computer screen. The latter result from a
prodigious accumulation, the former from a deferment suddenly revealed.
Language grows only through langage, that mark of the poet, and langage
needs all languages, which are the imagination of the world.

And, similarly, we actually read in these two ways. One in languages,

one in langage.
The first is erratic. An advertisement on a street corner, a thriller that
suddenly shows us violence (a major invariant of our time), a broadsheet
philosophy, no more absurd than any other, a popular novel, a fashionable
work, the confession of a serial criminal, an essay on the truffles of Périgord
and how to dig them up or on Moroccan couscous and its juicy sweetness,
worrying banalities on the emotion of death, fragments, scattered accumu-
lations, we should be noting all this, we don’t have time, it is like the root
running to meet other roots, like the leaf mingling with other leaves,
we actually read what we hear on television or what fascinates us in the
cinema, all the presence of all the languages that we use, a disjointed
reading, naively ferocious, a piling up of flashes of light, of communications,
which we do not join up together, you can’t join up flashes of light, it is
indeed the Whole-World that we are dealing with without knowing it, we
let it appear and disappear within us, but its work goes on, we gradually
learn to distinguish those invariants that it is so necessary for us to know,
and once again we put off the process of ordering this knowledge, and in
this way we descend (as though literally) into the letter of the world.

Then, we pause, we claim the right to rest. We go back to the great

texts, to what are called the great texts, and there, generally speaking, we
prefer the big books, the books of duration, which give us time, the Chinese
Water Margin,* The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or
La littérature européenne et le Moyen Âge latin.** This is because we are now
thinking about our langage.

* The Water Margin, attributed to the Chinese writer Shi Na’ian (c.1296–1327).
** La littérature européenne et le Moyen Âge latin, Ernst Robert Curtius, 1948.
102 Treatise on the Whole-World

With the first kind of reading, we are attending to the world, we are
experiencing its multiplicity, we are caught up in it. But with the second?
What are we seeking in these fundamental texts, beyond the slow,
measured pleasure of perceived beauty? In this duration that seems to take
us away from the bustle of the world?

My guess is that we are there in a state of medium-ness. We are perhaps

searching above all for the harbingers of the totality that now calls to us.
We want to find our invariants in it, and we ask how these texts have been
able to foresee them. To reinforce in ourselves, against the discontinuous
vagaries of precious wandering, the sense of duration, the rough patience
of time. This is what I call prospecting our own langage. Yes. That is how
we read these big books.

And for example, we find, in the abrupt, fragmentary texts of the

pre-Socratics – as though the fragment were a piece of a vanished duration
– this feeling that our period has renewed that pre-Socratic era, when
the hybridities of islands, the archipelagic thinking and the dreams of the
Great-Whole had connected the human to the earthly, or the cosmic. We
imagine that we are beginning again that encounter, at least as long as we
are not afraid of its mystical excesses. And that is an invariant.
We realize, from the slow history of Chaka as told by Thomas Mofolo
and based on the stories of the Zulu people, that the epic heroes are almost
all bastards who must painfully found a legitimacy that belongs to them
alone, but that they are almost always harmed by their descendants. And
that is an invariant.
We follow, as though along a river that appears and disappears, how
the Amerindian myths and stories signify that the earth never becomes
property, that it cannot be a territory, that human communities are not its
masters, that man is its guardian, not its absolute owner. (We remember
that when asked why they wear shoes whose toes turn up in front, like
medieval shoes or Saracen boots, the traditional Mongolian wrestlers reply:
‘It’s so as not to hurt the earth’.) And that is an invariant.

With the first reading we collect, in a disorganized fashion, the

material of the world; we do it in waves, like a population of scurrying
ants. A reading by city-dwellers, people vulnerable to the busy streets and
the mechanisms of communication, transport, socially organized work
and leisure. A reading by agitated people who give themselves up to the
flux. With the second, we isolate ourselves from the noise of the world but
 What Was Us, What Is Us 103

in order to find its trace or its invariant. A reading by country-dwellers,

people who dream of a shack open to the wind of Morne-Rouge, or of
a hearth, a fire, a chimney lost in a county, or of such slow discussions
under the baobab tree as the sun slowly sets, all places in which one can
be alone or else come together intentionally, a reading by people who
think about their langage, serious and intense like the owl of Greece
flying at dusk or the buffalo of Madagascar that no colony of leeches can
disturb.

And here are those who, still today, have no chance of ever opening a
book. Those who only ever experience a single Season, the Saison en enfer.*
Who would only ever be able to discover a single invariant, that which
knots inextricably together destitution, oppression, genocide, epidemics,
mass graves, exclusion. Those who could neither distinguish or choose
between life in the city or in the countryside, because they live permanently
in the wastelands of life. Those who have no reason to fear the hypothetical
ravages of audiovisual or computer techniques. For whom the book is still
a mirage and, if it is there, a miracle.
I see again in my memory the primer of an Andean ethnic group, an
irreplaceable book, spelling out the elements of a language under threat,
lost in the silence of the mountain, on reddish brown coarse-grained
paper, a book both humble and imperious in its necessity, perhaps already
useless. The great libraries of the world will not be kept or preserved
unless we also increase the number of small ones buried in the earth of
the planet.
It is also true, as has been pointed out to me, that the Internet appears
to be the instrument of the pre-eminence of technological societies over all
others. In this respect, it has purely and simply replaced the book. In this
huge creolization of cultures that it enables and inaugurates, the voices of
the destitute are absent. We must reject this selective creolization, but still
accept that it is advancing.
Will we one day be able to project into the space in front of us the verses
of Homer (both in Greek and in translation, to make it more beautiful)?
Probably. At least for those who will be able to master these techniques.

* Une Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell) is one of the major works of the poet
Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891).
104 Treatise on the Whole-World

But will we be able to compose poems, illustrate a creole language, weave

a langage, in this suspended space? Write in the wind, create out of
movement itself, turn a trap or a mishap into a patiently written work? Our
attachment to the book replies that we cannot, our passion for the world
claims that we can.

Let us open in us this book of the world, typographic or computerized.

The poets’ task is to bring us to this. But not Mallarmé’s Book, absolute
and improbable, not that Measure of immeasurability of which he so gener-
ously dreamed, but Immeasurability itself, unpredictable and unfinished.
Let us not fear the unstoppable progress of the new techniques or the
mutations that they cause in us.
I see the flux increasing and Relation in action.

But like you I am careful not to succumb to it completely. When the

murmuring of the world takes hold of us, when it swells around us with
so many diffracted decipherings, so many assaults of which we are barely
conscious, when it subjugates or disperses us, we still know that we have in
us that solitary buffalo, unassailable in its solidarity with us.
Thus the poet in his poem does not imitate immeasurability senselessly,
he does not repeat it, rather he juxtaposes it with the immeasurability of
his text, which is of a different kind. This is the moment when the noise
slows down, while remaining present.

Let us spy on the murmuring.

It invades us, incessant internet and inexhaustible torrent, it overwhelms

us with its vibration but - wait, look, listen - after it has filled us with all
kinds of happiness and misery, it moves away and disappears, leaving us
free to open the book we have chosen at the page that we want, or to write
on this sheet of paper, which will soon be the page of a book, the first words
of the poetics that we have always cared about, and then, this murmuring of
the world, like a book that one closes or a poem that one begins to recite,
it suddenly moves away into the distance, it leaves us, doubtless to reach
other poems, rejoin and designate other common places, other invariants,
and for us it fades away and, beautifully, dies out.
 What Was Us, What Is Us 105

Which, redone in a pedagogical fashion, to be inserted into a CD-Rom on

the book for example, and taken together with what we have said previously on
writing (oh the pleasures of repetition) would give the following, which takes us
to the joy of the common place:

Reading and Writing Today

Everyone agrees that the book is threatened by the progress of audio-
visual techniques. One can indeed assume that we will soon have at our
disposal devices that will project the texts that we wish to consult into
space or onto the walls of our rooms. And even, that we would be able to
put on the headset that would allow us to enter into virtual reality and
to experience directly the scenes of the battle of Waterloo that open La
Chartreuse de Parme, or to find ourselves in the cell with Edmond Dantès
and the abbey Faria, preparing to relive for ourselves the escape that
inaugurates the adventures of the Count of Monte-Cristo.
Science fiction authors have imagined the time when books would
therefore be abandoned in Libraries, which would become deconsecrated
cathedrals and where those who continued to consult these strange works
would be considered weirdoes, or ill in some way, who would meet up
almost clandestinely in underground places, rather like the first Christians
in the catacombs, to hastily and feverishly leaf through an original edition
of the Chants de Maldoror or a miraculously preserved collection of La
Petite Illustration, a magazine that was fashionable in France and the French
colonial empire in the 1930s. In this way, the audiovisual would have killed
reading, rendering it superfluous, and would have signed the death warrant
of the book.
One can also judge that the book and the computer screen complement
each other. Use of the latter gives us the vertiginous accumulation of the
world’s data, and the fastest possible way of putting them in correlation with
each other. Knowledge in general, the science or sciences more particularly
and technically, need these new practices. Our leisure activities, our search
for pleasure and relaxation, will be changed by it. The common place, thus
reshuffled, protects us from confusion when faced with the absolutely new.
But could it not be that this very speed, which is so invaluable, consti-
tutes a lack? In our increasingly accelerated dealings with the diversity
of the world, we need pauses, times for meditation, where we step aside
from the flood of information that is provided for us so that we can start
putting some order into our accidental encounters. The book is one of these
moments. After the first period of excitement, of limitless appetite for the
new means of acquiring knowledge that computer technology affords us,
106 Treatise on the Whole-World

it is good to find a balance, and for reading to regain its function of stabi-
lizing and regulating our desires, our aspirations, our dreams. The common
place, as exemplified above, generally helps us to accept the oppositions and
encourages us to reconcile them.
This distribution of roles recurs in the very manner in which we read
today. One kind of reading grabs our attention, rapid, everyday, and almost
unconscious. An advertising placard at the corner of a street, a newspaper
article, a thriller, fragments of information on the happenings of the world:
a choppy, rushed reading, as though we were in an Internet that swiftly
supplied us with a sparkling series of pieces of information.
Another kind of reading, which we perform in a far more thoughtful
manner, when we are at home, and we have the time to choose. Then, we
are not afraid of big books, which take some time to read: War and Peace,
In Search of Lost Time or Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.
We do not take the same books onto the bus or the tram, or in the
dizzying local taxis of Martinique. We who have the leisure to read instinc-
tively know how to organize our readings. This corresponds to the two
ways in which we employ our thinking: to experience the world by being in
it, even if we are sometimes carried away by its complexity and its rapidity;
or else to reflect on our relation to the world, on its transformations outside
us and in us, on the future that it offers us. In the first case, we do not
separate our readings from our daily activities, we are in the unceasing
Internet of life. In the second case, we isolate ourselves, we seek the silence
and the concentration of someone meditating on his future, we are in the
permanence and the slow work of the book. Is this prejudice (‘good’ and
‘bad’ literature) or a necessary division?

These same considerations are also valid for the practice of writing.
Writing today is not simply a case of telling stories to amuse or move, or
to impress, it is above all perhaps to look for the reliable link between the
crazy diversity of the world and the balance and knowledge that we wish for
in ourselves. This world is there in our consciousness or our unconscious, a
Whole-World, and, whatever we say, it demands our attention more every
day and we are obliged to try to test our abilities against it. The writer and
the artist have asked us to do this. Their work is marked by this vocation.

To be aware of the totality of the world and of what it has caused

to emerge in modernity. For example, knowledge of or desire for the
other cultures and other civilizations, which complement our own. The
importance of the techniques of orality, which are invading the practice of
 What Was Us, What Is Us 107

writing. The presence of the languages of the world, which inflect and alter
the way in which each of us uses his own language. A whole mixture of
possibilities for the artist and the writer, in which it is both exciting and
difficult to choose one’s way and to keep up the creative effort.

As a result of diversity, the writer is gradually abandoning the old

division into literary genres, which in the past contributed to the emergence
of so many masterpieces in the novel, the essay, poetry, drama. The explosion
of this diversity and the speedy development of audiovisual and computer
techniques have opened up the field to an infinite variety of possible genres,
of which we do not yet have a complete conception. Readers (in countries
where one has the leisure to read) are increasingly growing to like these
mixtures of genres, novels that are historical treatises, biographies that,
while still being accurate and detailed, are like novels, treatises on natural
science or astrophysics or marine science that read like poems or medita-
tions or adventure stories. Meanwhile, the poetics that have appeared in
the world are gaily reinventing the genres, unrestrainedly mixing them up.

We write in the same way that we read, today. In a crazily active and
rushed way, in tune with this whole momentum of the world and with the
runaway progress of the techniques of modernity, which carry us along in
their unstoppable flux. And perhaps, then, the writer becomes a provider of
the Internet’s floods. We also prepare, in oral accounts that are often hasty,
incomplete with regard to our intention, given in the most diverse places,
on dates that soon get mixed up, and like spot checks or letting off rockets
or topographical snapshots, material that we will later withdraw into
ourselves to organize on the page, when, while remaining in solidarity with
the movement, we want to be solitary, just as the reader isolates himself.
And in this case, the writer demonstrates all the patience that he needs in
his work, for he sees in front of him the book that he will finish, and which
he cannot imagine that human communities will one day no longer need.
108 Treatise on the Whole-World

I call the Whole-World our universe as it changes and lives on through

its exchanges and, at the same time, the ‘vision’ that we have of it. The
world-totality in its physical diversity and in the representations that it
inspires in us: so that we are no longer able to sing, speak or work based on
our place alone, without plunging into the imagination of this totality. The
poets always foresaw this. But they were damned, those in the West, for
not having accepted in their time the exclusivity of place, when this was the
sole norm that was required. Damned also, because they were well aware
that their dream of the world prefigured or accompanied its Conquest.
The conjunction of the histories of peoples opens up for today’s poets a
new way of writing. Worldness, while it is attested in the oppressions and
exploitations of the weak by the strong, is also to be found and experienced
by poetics, far from any generalization.
 What Was Us, What Is Us 109

It is the rhizome of all places that makes up the totality, and not a
uniformity of place in which we would evaporate. Our earth, our share of
the Earth, should not be constituted by us as a territory (of the absolute)
from which we would believe ourselves authorized to conquer the places
of the world. We are well aware that the forces of oppression are aimed
everywhere and nowhere, that they are quietly corrupting our reality,
that they govern it without us being able to see how or from where. But
at least we can already combat them with the bright light of Relation,
whereby we refuse to reduce a place or to make of it a Centre closed in
on itself. Everyone is embarking, at every moment, on a Treatise on the
Whole-World. There are a hundred thousand billions of them, rising up
everywhere. Each time different in sea spray and soil. In Guadeloupe or
Valparaiso, you leave from Baffin Island, or the land of Sumatra or the
bungalow Mon repos, first turning after the Post Office, or, if your silt has
crumbled around you, from a line that you have sketched out in the spaces,
and you rise to that knowledge. The painter Matta again: Toute histoire est
ronde comme la terre. N’occidentons plus tout du long, orientons vraiment.*

* ‘Every history is round like the Earth. Let us not westernize all the way, let us
easternize/orientate.’
110 Treatise on the Whole-World

That the being is relation, and it goes everywhere. That human

cultures exchange while living on, change without losing themselves: that
this becomes possible. I am this mangrove country in the Lamentin in
Martinique where I grew up and at the same time, thanks to an impercep-
tible infinite presence, which takes nothing away from the Other, that bank
of the Nile where the reeds turn to bagasse like sugar canes. The aesthetic
of Relation reduces to anachronism the illusions of exoticism, which made
everything uniform.
 • • •

Punctuations
Punctuations

Through so many crises that are the deadly price of coming together,
through so many wars where the One has been confronted via its all
too human incarnations, the Mediterranean is once again becoming an
archipelago, returning to what it perhaps was before finding itself engaged
with History. The Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean are seas that have
always been archipelagos. The continents, those masses of intolerance
rigidly turned towards a Truth, in so much as they regroup into entities or
confederate in common markets, are also archipelagizing into regions. The
regions of the world become islands, isthmuses, peninsulas, advances, lands
of mixing and passage, yet which still remain.
112 Treatise on the Whole-World

Jacques Berque and Literatures

We agree, with surprise, that we are now witnessing an opening up of
the word to the dimension of the world and that the supreme object of
literature is precisely this world-totality.
The opening up does not imply the dilution of the voice in a vague
Universal, nor a way of being nowhere, nor, for the being, a suspension,
existence in suspense, nor a painful or gnawing erasure.
What we see and feel is that the place from which we utter the word,
from which the voice makes itself heard, is all the more welcoming to
their accents for being placed in Relation, opening up its subject matter,
questioning its limit, destabilizing its limits.

In this way the poem forms a weave between the density of the place and
the multiplicity of the diverse, between what is said here and what is heard
over there. This is part of the jousting of the literary approach: to have to
consult the unpredictability and the non-given of the world, through the
fragile but persistent substance of our present, our surroundings.

There is a trajectory of wandering, from the place to the totality, and

vice versa. The work does not go out into the world without returning to
its source. This to-and-fro movement marks its true parabola. And Jacques
Berque* teaches us this, each time that he has had to sum up his work,
sketch out its general lines, its results. Whether it is about Islam, the Arab
world, the West or the peoples of what used to be called the Third World,
his detailed analyses never lose touch with a global vision: their conjunction
allows him to study the episode of each day and to project the work of the
future. He has always conceived of the approach to the Other in a vision
of solidarity with the world.

I also realize (and he pointed it out himself) that when we met it was
always to share a trembling, tiny or revelatory, physical or social or political,
of the totality of the earth. Once in Florence, when the left-wing Catholic
candidate La Pirra had just been elected mayor. In Algiers, the day of the
Declaration of the Algerian Republic. In my home in Martinique, when
a cyclone was about to pass over our heads and we stood at the window
breathing the smell of lead and speculating on all those clouds that formed
a blockade in the sky. Different places, but tethered to the same concern,

* Jacques Berque (1910–1995) was an Islamic scholar and sociologist.

 Punctuations 113

governed by the same hope. The hope of a bright spell to come, the threat
of an uncontrollable excess.
It is as though we had to repeat, all of us together, in the hazards of
our existence, this common place of the intellectual and creative life of our
time: to roam the imagination of the world to come to the debate of our
own surroundings, or vice versa.
If the multiple root is missing, we are projected into an infertile space;
but if the root closes up, encroaches, then we are blind to ourselves and to
the world.

All the work that Jacques Berque has done on Islam, the Arab world,
the colonized countries, also served to reflect on his own needs. So he saw
in Islam its rationality but also its mystique. What does this mean, if not
that that he believed that every conceptualization has its corresponding
poetics? In the same way, he explained, through the subjects he studied,
the often conflictual but always enriching encounter of orality and writing,
in the double field of the Arabic language for example, but also in the
context of modernity. All questions that are prominent in the literatures of
today. He was one of the first in France to teach this, calmly, without any
manifesto, with rectitude and clarity.
This clarity, in the structure of his thought and also in its expression,
is close to what we could call a humanism. A clarity that is forever
questioning. That of the pioneer, who clears the ground, or the ploughman.
It is therefore also accompanied by an appeal to that which is blurred,
to mystery, and by an anxious attention to whatever is weaving itself in
the underside of the real, by an approach to the incomprehensible, the
inexpressible.
Which does not in any way detract from its clarity.

Examiner of the disparities in the world, sensitive to its diversity, careful

to emphasize its convergences, Jacques Berque gave us a privileged intro-
duction to the literatures of the peoples of our time.
114 Treatise on the Whole-World

The Subject of Africa

The poetry of Léopold Sédar Senghor,* ceremonial and splendid, brings
us the rhythm of the verse, in which we find our breath, and we will not
forget that it has also fulfilled a function, humble and proud, regulated by
the scribe or the copier, whereby it has brought African subject matter into
the knowledge and sensibility of the beginning of the twentieth century.

It is not of course the dazzling science, the divination by thunder, that

the Romans practiced literally and that was re-established in literature by
the ‘poètes maudits’, Arthur Rimbaud or Antonin Artaud, but the patient
requisition of a whole area of reality that is knocking at the doors of the
world, at these multiple windows that are now opening onto our common
modernities.

A solemn repertoire. The transfiguration, the offering of a whole

universe, that of the cultures of black sub-Saharan Africa, up until then
trapped in the complacencies that the forces of oppression spread in order
to manage their impudent violations.

The scribe is not a clerk with fearless hands and a cold heart, and poetry
never rejects this kind of encyclopedic work that is worthy of its most secret
intention, a work of reorganizing and collecting together the given, through
which it brings us close to the world’s diversity, which we need so much.
The poem is one of the matrices of the alchemy of the real.
The copyist is not the unflinching imitator, who would never depart
from the model that he has chosen, and whose hand fills in the outlines of
other people’s drawing with monochrome colours. Léopold Sédar Senghor
was suspected of having been as it were frozen by Catholic inspiration: a
kind of paralysis in the face of the statue of the Commander in the shape of
Claudel for example. But his model is African and, beneath the solemnity
of the forms, the colours change according to the movement of the rivers
and the assaults of the bush of the black country.

* Together with Césaire, Senghor was the founder of the Negritude movement.
 Punctuations 115

In Senghor we find that sacred bestiary, which suddenly escapes the

conventions of exoticism: those reptiles of the Third Day, those agami
birds, those monkeys whose cries are like cymbals. Beasts that sing like
omens, in this day of annunciation. They are seen and respected by the
eye of memory, of tradition and intimate legend, by the eye that interprets.
Beasts, and also trees, ardently meeting up with those of Victor Segalen
and Saint-John Perse, across spaces still unknown and not yet joined
together.
Let us explore this newly established geography, which is no longer the
prey of the discoverers and the conquerors but the tender place of lovers,
the object of hard work, the interjection of suffering and joy, which are
added on to the real. Colonization has not carried everything away in its
derision.
The emotion of meeting the kori, which we are told is a ‘thin line of
greenery which, in the desert, marks the bed of a river, usually dried up’,
or of running along the tann, ‘flat land covered by the sea or an inlet at the
time of spring tides’. We carry within us our own koris, memories of ancient
prosperity, and our tanns, promises of future fervour. This poetic geography
announces sharing and Relation.

Let us learn, from the register of instruments of art as well as the

catalogue of everyday tools. In this first half of the century, here are –
offered and officiating – those objects that will become so familiar to music
lovers, the kora and the balafon, and the khalam, quieter, ‘a kind of four-
stringed guitar, which is the usual accompaniment of the elegy’.

Africa! Africa! Country of colonialist tumult and devastation, but also

country of the elegy, the sabar and the mbalakh, and of the woy, a song or
poem, which the humanist Senghor realizes is ‘the exact translation of the
Greek ode’.
It may be that we do not willingly subscribe to this image of the Greco-
Latin Negro, but do we not, ultimately, like the fact that Senghor, the son
116 Treatise on the Whole-World

of prestigious and very ancient cultures, tries in this way to share with
Western man what the latter has uttered most profoundly? Shall we deny
the woy its kinship with the ode, and vice versa?
Around these poems, a human community rises. Samana Ban Ana Baâ
for instance, who is quite a joker, and Koli Satiguy, a holy man, or Abou
Moussa, the usurper.
African names will from now on proclaim their genealogy in the song
of the world.
Bestiary, account of kinship, catalogue, botanical textbook, plani-
sphere and portolan of the Senegalese country, Senghor’s poetic world,
more than it seemed, opened the way for the novelists and film-makers
who have explored the reality of this part of Africa and have revealed its
true riches.

A world strewn with angry shouts, punctuated by the sacred tutoiement

of the fundamental texts, and where the spoken word is truly the elder
sister of writing. Senghor’s work is one of the first in which the traditional
ease of African speech, solemn and joking, mocking or tragic, has informed
the austere presence of the written poem.

It is not for me to point out that the work of the politician, the man
of reflection and action, has met with objections and criticism: it is for
the Senegalese people themselves to measure the distance that may have
grown up between Senghor and them, to calculate the distance between
Casamance and Normandy, which became the poet’s favourite place, and
to decide whether this distance is significant or not.

I like the fact that the calm insurrection of Senghor’s words accom-
panied from the outset another exclamation, that of Aimé Césaire, and
that the same new phase of the world came into being through these two
representatives of Negritude: the man from the African source, the man
from the diaspora.
The source moved elsewhere and Africa flowed into the Americas, after
the holocaust of transportation. The Immense Waters of the Ocean drew
them horribly together. Permanence has turned into diversity. Is this not
what we sense in Senghor, when he confides in us, as though in a whisper:
‘My heart is always wandering, and the sea has no limits.’
 Punctuations 117

I am also happy to remind you, very briefly, that another Senegalese

intellectual, Alioune Diop, undertook to list, in the review Présence
africaine, the same concrete and significant particularities of the black
country as Senghor’s poem had pointed out. Présence africaine and La
Société africaine, on which Senghor, Richard Wright, Cheik Anta Diop,
Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Rabemananjara, and so many others
collaborated.

Raise our voices for the bard that we see there serene and impassive. But
his voice thrills with the trembling of his native land.
118 Treatise on the Whole-World

Globalization, seen as non-place, would indeed result in a standardized

dilution. But for each of us, the path that leads from our place to the world
and back again, again and again, indicates the only permanence. The world
in its finished totality cannot be considered a sufficient reason, a generality
giving birth to its own generalization. The weave of the world is enhanced
by all the particularities, quantified; by all the places, recognized. The
totality is not what has been called the universal. It is the quantity, finished
and realized, of the infinite detail of the real. And which, because it is a
matter of detail, is not totalitarian.
 Punctuations 119

The Earth and the Territory*

The ‘realization’ of the earth-totality has changed the perception or the
imagination that each human community has of ‘its’ land. The physical
frontiers between nations have been made permeable to cultural and intel-
lectual exchanges, to the hybridization of sensibilities, which has meant
that the nation-state is no longer powerful enough to barricade from the
inside everyone’s relation to the earth.
This does not cause a dilution of nationality, but a reduction in the
number of nationalisms, in spite of the current excesses which, in the
world, are the vehement sign of a return of the nationalist repressed.
The Poetics of Relation enables us to approach the difference between a
land, which we relate to elsewhere, and a territory, whose doors we close to
the wind blowing outside. Modernity swings uncontrollably between these
opposite ways of our inhabiting of the place.

Summary of the Paper Given on This Occasion

I call creolization the meeting, the interference, the shock, the
harmonies and disharmonies between cultures, in the realized totality of
the world-earth.
Its characteristics are:
– the dizzying speed of the interactions that it sets up;
– the ‘consciousness of consciousness’ that we have of these;
– the mutual valorization that results and that makes it necessary for
everyone to re-evaluate for themselves the components placed in contact
(creolization does not presuppose a hierarchy of values);
– the unpredictability of the results (creolization is not limited to
hybridity, whose syntheses were foreseeable).

The examples of creolization are inexhaustible and one observes that

they first took shape and developed in archipelagic rather than continental
situations.
My proposition is that today the whole world is archipelagizing and
creolizing itself.
In these circumstances, it has become necessary for us to distinguish
between two forms of culture:
Those that I will call atavistic, whose creolization took place a very long
time ago, if it did take place, and which have meanwhile armed themselves

* Paper given at a conference on modernity at the University of Tokyo,

November 1996.
120 Treatise on the Whole-World

with a corpus of mythical narratives aiming to reassure them as to the

legitimacy of their relations with the land that they occupy. These mythical
narratives usually take the form of a Creation of the world, of a Genesis.
Those that I will call composite, whose creolization is happening so
to speak before our very eyes. These cultures do not generate a Creation
of the world, they do not consider the founding myth of a Genesis. Their
beginnings proceed from what I call a digenesis.

We observe that the composite cultures are tending to become atavistic,

that is, to lay claim to a permanence, an honorability of time, which would
seem to be necessary to any culture in order for it to be sure of itself and
to have the boldness and the energy to express itself. They usually do this
under the pressure of the necessities of their liberation (these cultures
having almost all been the object of a colonization, violent or ‘discreet’),
which demands the passionate certainty that one is oneself and not
someone else.
The atavistic cultures, in contrast, are tending to break up, to creolize
themselves, that is, to question (or to defend very dramatically) their
legitimacy. They do this under the pressure of the generalized creolization
whose object, we have said, is the earth-totality.
This results in two conceptions of identity, which I have tried to define
according to the image of the single root and the rhizome, developed by
Deleuze and Guattari.
A sublime and deadly conception, which the cultures of Europe and
the West have transported around the world, of identity as the single root,
excluding the Other. The single root implants itself in a land that becomes
a territory.
A notion that has now become ‘real’, in all composite cultures, of identity
as rhizome, going to meet other roots. And that is how the territory once
again becomes a land.

Among the myths that have led the way towards the consciousness
of History, the foundational myths have had as their role to consecrate
the presence of a community on its land, by attaching this presence to a
Genesis, without any discontinuity and by legitimate filiation. This is what
gives them their atavistic character.
The foundational myth provides obscure reassurance as to the unbroken
continuity of this filiation, based on a Genesis, and from then on authorizes
the community in question to consider this land where it lives, which has
now become a territory, as absolutely its own.
 Punctuations 121

By an extension of the legitimacy, it happens that, in passing from myth

into historical consciousness, the community considers that it has been
given the right to extend the limits of this territory. This is what has given
‘legitimacy’ to all colonizations.

For as long as the earth-totality had not been accomplished, for as long
as there were lands to discover, an unknown to conquer, this drive towards
the expansion of a territory appeared to be a kind of ontological necessity
for the peoples and cultures that believed themselves chosen to discover
and govern the world, and who did so.
In the earth-totality that is today physically realized, where creolization
has replaced the drive towards expansion and the legitimacy of conquest,
the Poetics of Relation enables us to approach the difference between a
land (the crucial place of all beings) and a territory (reclamation as the
ritual, now infertile, of the Being).
From this point of view modernity is the play, begun anew each time,
of this difference and this mutation.
122 Treatise on the Whole-World

Roche

The time has come when the word becomes its own place. That is to
say that it takes itself as its object, not through complacency, nor because it
finds itself uprooted from its surroundings, but because it tries to consider
whether, out of all the possible places of the world, there is an invariant, a
place of places, neither a consensus nor a generalization, but a trace that
persists. A trace that would keep alive vigilance, and humour, and the
assaults of thought.

Maurice Roche’s writing is like this. And it approaches this place

of places through suffering, solitude, healthy derision, faced with the
stupidity and the derelictions of our human societies. Through laughter,
the quietest possible. The writing does not work on the common place
in the new sense that we have given to this expression - a meeting of the
intuitive thoughts of the world - it brings the common place back down to
its sad status as revelation of stupidity. And embroiders the object, explores
it, turns it over and over, until we have succumbed to vertigo. I think it is
one of the virtues of this writing that it unfailingly inclines us, through the
simplicities that it stages and diverts, to this vertigo which leads us into
the immeasurability of the world. ‘I don’t feel well’ [‘Je ne vais pas bien’] is
a common place of the most ordinary kind, and ‘I don’t feel/go well, but I
must go there’ [‘Je ne vais pas bien, mais il faut que j’y aille’] (the title of one
of Roche’s novels) is already an introduction to the swaying lilt of a drifting
meaning. A writing that dances.

Compact gave us its first music.* To use another of the common places
of our time (a fashionable mode or thing), we can say that it is a cult work:
one of the rare places, both secret and public, where we see confirmed
something inexpressible that we had sensed in the mass of all things.
But people say that about so many works whose only effect is to ratify
the conventions (the most basic ones) of our collective drives. Compact is
different: the book resists.
It was written, literally, in a multicoloured fashion. A different poet has
said, ‘life needs all the colours’. We were not aware of this poetic intention,
since the first editions of the work were monochrome, classical, even if the
diffracted layout and the playful dispersion of the words already alerted

* Compact, trans. Mark Polizzotti (Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1988).

 Punctuations 123

us to the fact that here was a field of weaves, an unknotting of structures:

a different way of practicing writing: ‘A texture of signs, of scars, a tactile
weave coming apart …’
The ‘object’ of the novel is simple and complex (that is to say total): a
man is wasting away (dying? waking up?) in his bedroom, or in any other
solitary place, a hospital room, an operating theatre, and he goes blind, and
he fantasizes, or realizes, the world. ‘You will lose sleep as you lose sight.’
– ‘As you lose sight, you will lose sleep.’ To see truly.

The beauty of the new edition of Compact, in colours, published by

Tristram, means that at first we seem to have been awarded the favour of a
more elementary, faster reading – we follow the line of a colour, as they say
in planes that we will have to follow a phosphorescent trail to the ground,
in the case of an accident – but we immediately realize that this simplicity
acted as a mask: the mystery of these words remains, to the extent that
they convince us, most importantly, that we are all of us participating ‘in
everything’.
The clever reader soon finds satisfaction in entering into these colours
of the text and specifying them. I tell myself, for example, that all the tones
of a novel, from the emotional to the documentary, from the direct address
to the confidential, from realism to symbolism, are intervening here. And
I believe that I can spot them through an organization that I seem to have
guessed: the colours are organized, or rather disorganized, by means of the
table of personal pronouns.
The colour green: I.
The black: you singular.
The light orange: he.
The light brown: we.
The white on a black background: you plural.
To which is added the blue of any situation described, where the real
is captured in the dazzling net of its perception, and the red, which corre-
sponds to the impersonal ‘one’: at the same time I, you singular, he, we and
you plural. The ‘one’ of tragic debate. The ‘one’ also of the anonymous letter
and of clichés. The ‘one’ of the world bewildered and hunted down.

So. We have understood how it functions. We can read ‘linearly’, by

following one of these colours from one end of the book to the other. There
would then be complete series of meanings that would simply marry up, at
the point where one colour (a pronoun, a tone, a situation) would take over
from another, and be interrupted itself and then come back further on. We
124 Treatise on the Whole-World

hardly stop to ask what symbolism is involved in the choices and attribu-
tions of the colours, why the green is for I, why the ‘ordinary’ printing fonts
(in black) are used only for the you singular, which is this I that examines
and usually underrates itself? Or is it the demands of the printing works
that has decided these attributions? Clever reader, although it doesn’t take
much (all of that was easy to work out), but conceited as well.
Because he very soon comes across these moments where the green
confronts the blue, for example, and the black irrupts into the mass of light
brown, like a volcanic island in a sea of faded lava: in other words, these
internal articulations of the text as a whole. And it is not linear as we had
thought. It requires the pleasure of a different kind of reading. The blue
contaminates the green, the light orange pushes the black to its greatest
excesses, and we never know how they will all react to being woven together
in this way, which both constrains and liberates them. The word works on
itself, arises each time from its own birth, its own contradiction, its internal
Relation, the enormous duration accumulated from so many revelatory
dispersals. The mass that emerges from this is a dizzying Whole-World,
which involves us. ‘We are the sum of all that’.

It was not so simple and our linear readings (a red reading, a blue
reading) were naïve and fallacious. Here, we learn to read by panting hard,
by the call of our breaths, by breathing in all the air around us, and I cannot
help coming back here to the prose of Michel Leiris, although it is true that
this is organized into an obvious weave, whereas Maurice Roche doggedly
maintains the gap in the cloth.
They have a great deal in common, despite these opposite rhetorics.
The passion for pure geometry, for the plan, for the projection of straight
lines between the stars in the sky. The inclination therefore towards an
idea or a sensibility of the rough, the exact, the non-lyrical, materials that
constitute the solid basis for another distraction, a different kind of vertigo.
And then, the word-play, which diffracts the unity of the meaning. Leiris’s
Aurora, or aux rats is echoed in douleur, doux leurre, d’où l’heure, which is
no less compromising and contaminating. For illness and death, it is never
(it is always) the time [l’heure].

All of History, all the histories, all the languages, all the pidgins, and
Old French, the slangs, the digests, the oratory sentence, the musical score,
 Punctuations 125

the proverbs, the recipes for just about everything that exists, has been
made or imagined, the instructions for use, the graphics, Latin and Greek,
Chinese or Japanese characters, and also invisible ink, summaries of texts
(which are not the same as digests) or pharmaceutical formulae, all of this
organized in a scrum, like in rugby, to be deployed, all of this invading us,
readers affected in turn. ‘And – regressus ad originem to coincide with the
cosmogony – this went backwards through time’.*

‘One feels more and more cramped as the world grows larger.’** No, really
not, dear Maurice Roche, not restricted: fragile, uncertain and threatened,
and perhaps a little despairing of so many pitfalls in the world, but as lucid
as possible. The proof, Compact. This book has brought together for us
what was scattered, crossed out (writing like an obstinate scratching), the
most beneficial corruptions, and what there will be in his later books of
music, of illness and death, an endless dust. But one which comes together
as granite, as pillars of lava. As a totem, devastated humanity, carves its
shadow in the stone, as a language invents itself within language, like a
world. Burst open, winding, its colours shimmering, its subject matter
dispersed, and at the same time full and compact. Like a rock [roche].
It seems to me that everything that we shout out in the exaltation and
excitement of the world-thought, Maurice Roche carefully invents it, under
the accumulation of crossings out, which taken together in(tro)duces – to
talk like Roche – such a field of energies. The question remains, for all of
us who are perhaps blind to our time: ‘How can we now tell apart day and
night?’ We consult Compact, which is our Braille in these shadows.

* Compact, p. 14.
** Compact, p. 10.
126 Treatise on the Whole-World

‘But look, History still goes on rehashing these recalls to the identitarian,
based on a territory . . etc.’*
Those are the last desperate bursts of the return of the identitarian
repressed. The more the progress of Relation is ascertained, the more
creolization grows, the more the madness of those who are panicked by this
movement of the world is exacerbated. Their new demon, the absolute Evil
that they intend to exorcise, is what they call globalization. Then the places
of hybridity and sharing, the Beiruts and the Sarajevos, are systematically
crushed and hammered. In the smallest village where a bridge had been
built between two communities, this bridge is blown up. The Rwandas are
maintained in their dereliction. It would seem that we cannot do anything
about it. But we are changing in ourselves, and, all around, there are these
breaths of the last night.

* Compact, p. 87.
 Punctuations 127

The difficulty is that the forces of oppression, which are multinational

and whose interest lies in realizing their earth-totality, where they will be
able to go everywhere to carry out their profiteering, the biggest cities, the
smallest island, also make use of a strategy that seems to encourage our
relation to the world. ‘Open up! Don’t close yourself up in your identity’.
Which in this case means: ‘Give in to the unstoppable necessity of the
market’. In this way they hope to dilute you in the current trends. Some
peoples resist. Yes, with difficulty. The necessary opposition can in fact
sometimes lead to a closing-off and, by a terrible irony, ratify the implicit
threat decreed by the capitalist.
 • • •

Objections to this ‘Treatise’ by Mathieu Beluse,

and Reply
Objections to this ‘Treatise’ by Mathieu Beluse, and Reply

Objections
Because this whole environment uproots us. From a single newspaper
in a single corner of the world (all countries are corners), in just a single
day: The Australian authorities make an official apology to the Aboriginal
nations for the widespread abductions of their children perpetrated for
decades, children who were submitted to a savage forced assimilation and
then The murderous fighting in the Congo is increasing (they have forgotten
somewhere the refugees from Zaire, one or two million, who knows, or
where) and then It is not known how many people have been summarily
executed in Albania and then The waters of the Hague are said to increase
leukemia and then The Mediterranean is being devoured by seaweed from
an improbable source and then A man died before crossing the frontier
dozens of little packets of cocaine were found in his stomach and then A
network of child abusers has been dismantled and then A man armed with
a machine gun enters a school and kills twenty-eight young pupils and their
teacher and then Holes are appearing in the earth’s ozone and then The
Israeli settlers do not intend to slow down the compulsory occupations of
the Palestinian territories and then Massacres are spreading all over Algeria
and then There is an earthquake in Iran, and some just about everywhere in
California but they don’t count, it’s just the usual and then The gap between
the countries of the North and the South is growing dramatically and then
The United States is turning the screw on migration, the French are not far
behind, there is only Italy where you can enter freely, but perhaps that will
not last and then The second world summit opens under sombre auspices
and then The litany of common places, market economy, globalization,
multi-ethnic societies, wars and massacres, massacre and war. Imagine
what we imagine.
130 Treatise on the Whole-World

Because, for example, we are only just beginning to realize how barbaric
it is to demand that a community of immigrants should ‘integrate’ into the
host community. Creolization is not a fusion, it requires each component
to persist, even while it is already changing. Integration is a centralist and
autocratic dream. Diversity is at play in the place, runs across different
times, breaks and unites voices (languages). A country that creolizes is
not a country that becomes uniform. The multi-coloured rhythms of the
populations go together with the diversity of the world. The beauty of a
country grows from its multiplicity.

Because we sense that the flows of immigration, for which we recognize

specific causes (populations fleeing the slaughter of war, people exhausted
by famine in their place, the slow sliding of whole collectivities towards
the lands of hope) are perhaps also governed by an erratic dynamic, an
element of the dream of the world, which mean that we do not understand
to what extent or why these flows of immigration begin and then stop.
Have the conditions improved in the country of origin? Does the country
of destination not provide as many advantages as one might have thought?
And what if the flows were more irrational than we thought, and at least
of a fractal nature?

Because all of this makes a wave. Across the whole planet, the great
waves of music, the heartbreak shared like an elementary - and all the
more sacred - communion. But also, the mysterious traces of hybridities
that open up all kinds of combined, associated, complicit types of music.
Planet-wide, too, the excitements born of watching sporting events, as
though the world were a huge Coliseum. Planet-wide the explosions of the
common sensibility, which is being perverted with the same obstinacy and
as though in a single direction. We don’t know what love is, and we don’t
care. Planet-wide of course is globalization, for which no-one is prepared,
although it has been coming for some time. The movements not of workers,
as in the good old days, but of workplaces (to where the costs are lowest),
which ravage one region without enriching another. The laws of profit,
whose undetectable enmeshing obeys a structure of chaos, and which
always causes chaos. All the common places of what is vanishing, which
are not encounters of the world’s thoughts, but a generalized recognition
of the same loss full of energies.

Because we guess that what is around us is the true second world, that
which expanding techniques are trying elsewhere to create in information
 Objections to this ‘Treatise’ by Mathieu Beluse, and Reply 131

technology. We live our life and we live the life of the world. It seems at
times that the former is the delusion of the latter, which we cannot control.
We live in two or several dimensions, at least when the conditions of our
surroundings allow us some space for echoes and, literally, reflection.
The novel cannot illustrate this or even become aware of it: the measure
of this burning, imperceptible stirring of all the tangled facts of such an
Inextricable: not history, but explosions. Or else the novel becomes poetry.
Poetry lays the foundation of an imagination that is fragmentary and total-
izing, fragile and active.

Because we will have to get used to the increasing lack of differentiation

of species, of races, of genres, of viruses or of varieties of the living, (the
machine for producing mutants), which is winning without us being able
to understand why.

Because we are approaching this new, floating knowledge, which enables

you not to go under.

Because we therefore know that we must live inside, or disappear into

the distance.
132 Treatise on the Whole-World

We say that Relation is worldwide and this is not to state the obvious,
for we see that not only is its space that of the world, but also that its
particular spaces are irrigated by the space of the world. There are certainly
closed spaces, from which it is difficult to escape, for all sorts of reasons:
economic, political, mental. There are devastated places, whose misfortune
maintains their closure. But the space of the world is always present,
an invariant. How can we revive this presence in the imagination of a
community apparently reduced by its isolation, while at the same time it is
fighting against what isolates it?
 Objections to this ‘Treatise’ by Mathieu Beluse, and Reply 133

Reply
Consider the misfortune of peoples. Not only as a moral concern, but
because this misfortune, always offended or obliterated, makes up a large
part of our knowledge of the world and ourselves.

Consider the work of this knowledge. In our intellectual galaxy, ignorant

valuation of the sciences appears possible. We dare to think that we will
become involved in this activity of science without losing our way. Because
science, via a whole number of techniques, has entered our lives. It is no
longer that mythical domain, set apart, impenetrable to common sense,
distant and improbable, that it was in the nineteenth century in Europe. It
inhabits other places of knowledge, inspired by cultures hitherto despised.
There have been so many practical applications of it, which speak to us
directly, that we claim quite bluntly to inhabit it. The popularizations seem
just as decisive as that which they disseminate. Terrifying genetic manipula-
tions, carried out in secret laboratories, no longer really astonish us. We are
capable of discussing them calmly, to disagree with them or accept them.
As though the simple fact of talking about them in public constituted a
barrier and a protection. Then, because these proliferations of specialisms
and their applications have confirmed in the general consciousness the
feeling that there is no longer one secret to discover (the ‘nub’ of the matter)
but thousands, and that science now authorizes roundabout routes and
unlikely paths. The theories of the sciences of Chaos (‘Chaos theory, you
know? …’) add still more. Erratic systems, invariants, fractal realities are
features not only of matter in movement but also of human cultures in
interaction. We all feel that that they are adequate for us. Finally, because
one whole part of science, perhaps the most adventurous, confirms what
we would call an aesthetics: a common background of truth and beauty,
without the latter merely being the splendid reflection of the former. There
is for us a beauty of the world which is self-sufficient, in truth.
Consider the dissemination of different kinds of knowledge and sensi-
bility. Here is a very particular illustration of these, ironically.
134 Treatise on the Whole-World

I will sing you a parable, i.e. a very pretentious story.

‘The Spirits are the masters that one dreams of. They decide on the
Here which is their Centre and the Elsewhere which is allotted to you on
the periphery. Ah! You are “the people from over there”. All of us, in fact.
We insist on arguing that our area is reality and the Centre is a dream. The
Spirits are an entity, made up of distinct and imperceptible elements. But
these Spirits have created us, we have fashioned them in our minds, and
that is how the system works.

‘The Entity of Action, itself triple (remember, for example, hope faith
charity, or liberty equality fraternity, and so on ad infinitum), thinks in a
single movement and acts in the same way. Let us stop trying to guess by
what mechanisms, but just to know that it works, and the proof of this is
our existences brought back, like grey earth in the red earth.

‘The Entity of Permanence is unique. Its function is not to express or to

act but to be. Ah! Being … Being … It crumbles parts of time with which
it clothes itself and covers “the people from over there”. Us, that is.

‘The Entity of Speech analyses every word from here and from over there
(where we have situated ourselves) and throws back into nothingness every
utterance that it has judged unacceptable to its taste. We suffer terribly
from this. The speaker whose speech is thus diverted into silence finds
himself the object of a diminution of presence, let’s not say Being, from
which he rarely recovers. It is said that this Entity maintains among “the
people from over there” - us, that is - courtesans and informers, creating
happy and unhappy people. It compares us with each other, which frightens
us, it draws up scales and rankings for us. It chooses us.

‘The Spirits know that they are the dream of “the people from over
there” and that they would vanish if the latter stopped believing in them.’

This is just a parable, a specious story that believes in itself.

 Objections to this ‘Treatise’ by Mathieu Beluse, and Reply 135

The advances or the guesses of the sciences and the plunges or the
wanderings of artistic creation are certainly not continuous with each
other. It is perhaps this that science and art most definitely share. But the
creator ratifies and the scientist supposes: two dimensions of the way of
inventing. The artist needs to be convinced that he is right at the moment
that he moulds his creation, the scientist needs to doubt, even when he has
proved. They both thus invest in the unknown, on the basis of the knowable
world. Their relations are of concerted uncertainty, of dreamed certainties.
‘That which exists, beyond appearances’ – such could be their guarantee of
meeting, their best common place.
 • • •

Measure, Immeasurability
Measure, Immeasurability

The One magnifies and the Diverse acclaims.

That we are integral to this constellation of humanities. That this does
not turn into a system. That the totality is forever totalizing. That the All
is not closed nor sufficient. This is living the world.
Dreaming it as well. The magnificence of O. V de L. Milosz!* ‘How
beautiful is the world, beloved, how beautiful is the world.’
But to dream the world is not to live it. For us, beauty does not grow
from the dream, it explodes in the entanglement.

* Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz (1877–1939) was a French poet of Lithuanian

origin.
138 Treatise on the Whole-World

Infinitive of time
Does time ratify legitimacy? Is it not rather
Filiation, desiring and measuring time
Providing duration when duration is lacking
That supports, by nature and right,
Its principle?

When the horde of filiations has tumbled down

Legitimacy vanishes. Then
No more indicator – that arrow – of time
Bursting forth
Projecting, ravaging
In the consuming fire of linearity
The space of the world.

Filiation tried hard to keep the line

Of the generations, it counted out
The almanac of time. But it is
In pain and leprosy, the dry force
That fastened its necessity
Pegged its joint, to the whole
Of this body, all plunder and root
The territory.

Legitimacy was that peg

And this rivet. It was the Shore
From where to set out to conquer, by negating
Happy multi-time, and through the ecstasy
Of root-time.

It is why we have seen

This growing rapacious time-world
Which intended to eat the world
Expel it
Into universal concretion, that is
Into absolute Territory.

And just like the landscapes the countries

Which share and come to life
Are the Finistères of the territory
 Measure, Immeasurability 139

Open it up into paths, make it infinite

Yes just like that.

To disengage filiation
That absolute of legitimacies, to divert
The supposed time-world from its line,
Is to gush forth in chaos at last
In the multiplicities of time
Which all mean that anyone can envisage it
Or stare it down
Without faltering.
140 Treatise on the Whole-World

The drifting of languages makes for a painful passion: no-one was more
subject to this than Gaston Miron. In a Montreal street, he would stoop
down to the pavement, pick up his poor beautiful Quebecker language,
and say to me: ‘Look, look at these people passing by, they are suffering
in their language. Perhaps they cannot pick it up like this. And how could
we imagine bilingualism or multilingualism, when they are stealing our
language?’ I would repeat that for my own part the Creole language was
also left abandoned, and many others were disappearing, and that we must
go out to meet the languages of the world without confining ourselves to
our own voice. He would continue, and of course he was right: ‘That’s fine,
with our guts and our heads, we will hold up high our French languages,
and also our Creole languages’. Michael Smith, the murdered poet, worked
in a different way, with the singers of Dub poetry, from within the very
foundation of the English language. The result was a baroque tension,
a raucous concentration of accents, like someone who has already been
shouting for too long in a desert. I deplore the fact that I do not know the
Arabic language, I cannot appreciate how Mahmoud Darwish takes it into
new landscapes, as one can sense from the French translations of his texts.
But translation is the very thing that enables us to sense this. Darwish
has spoken about the Americas, engaged in his poetry with Columbus,
sung the praises of Relation. To open the imagination of languages, to give
them new places, is a way of truly combatting uniformities, dominances,
standards.
 Measure, Immeasurability 141

Martinique
Let us say that Utopia is just and enduring when it is shared with
everyone. When, shared, it does not descend into presumptuousness and
collective madness. Let us forget the politicians’ worries, we, the people of
Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana. Certainly, we were right not
to let those people who in French Guiana had fought against denial,
equivocation and injustice languish in prisons built on our land without
protesting. In the same way we will be right to join together into a single
body to attempt a great work. We are used to thinking in archipelagic
terms; let us act, too, in accordance with this fine immeasurability, which
is neither disorder nor bewilderment. Let us summon Barbados and
Jamaica, Trinidad and Puerto Rico, let us call Cuba and Haiti. See how we
graft Utopia onto all these plants of the Creole vegetation. At least, let us
propose it. We need them, they need us. No, the notion of need is too
limiting. The peoples of the Caribbean are in us, and we are in them. Let’s
contribute if we can to making these Archipelagos strong places in the
world, proudly common places. Let’s begin to clean up our surroundings,
so that Martinique for example proclaims and maintains itself, integrally,
a land of organic products and clarity. Let’s stop believing in the production
of unsaleable, badly protected commodities, whose fate depends on policies
that are always changing and decided elsewhere. Let’s no longer limp from
readjustments to bankruptcies, from subsidies to job losses. Let’s look
elsewhere in the world for places where products that we will want, develop,
realize through our common determination, could be offered and accepted.
In the world there is a place (buyers, people who know what they like and
are excited by the exchange) for everything that would come out of a space
of light, for everything that would proceed from the determination to clean
up the seas and the clouds, the Gardens and the Sands. What is called a
market means that the peoples who can do so pay more for the objects and
commodities in the world that they know fulfill the assurances that the
general mentality is increasingly demanding: untouched by industrial or
chemical pollution, conforming to a new kind of beauty in the world and a
new health for contemporary human communities. Many others have
started along this path. But for us, it is not too late. We believe in the future
of small countries, when they form an archipelago like this. Let’s remember,
as far as we are concerned, that the statutory problems in our relations with
France produce nothing but endless badly argued discussions, for as long
as independence of thinking, deciding and acting is not there. France is a
country that can no longer, apart from its old politicians, afford to coerce
another country. It is too fragile within itself, victim of its xenophobic
142 Treatise on the Whole-World

impulses, to sustain another quarrel. If its leaders are not following up on

the discussions, it is because we ourselves are not speaking with one voice
and perhaps they really do not know whom to believe. The question of the
status can be handled from within our position in the Caribbean. Let’s
speak to France, not to fight against it, nor to be its servants, nor its
employees, but to tell it with a single voice that we are going to undertake
something different. Let’s also explain to France that the norm of its
language would soon become obsolete (there are in France shriveled old
specialists of this language, just as anachronistic and pretentious as those
old politicians we were talking about), if the language did not run the risks
of the world. And that we have transmuted it, this language, by taking it
with us. As for example the Jamaicans have with the English language or
the Cubans with Spanish. Let’s seize on this first of all, and first of all from
the depths of ourselves: the independence of thought. Let’s go openly
towards this utopia which we need so much. Let’s make Martinique a place
of the world, this is our vocation: that is, a place from which we will
gradually neutralize the built-up areas that for a long time we believed to
be obvious signs of prosperity, where we will regenerate our lands rotten
with pesticides, where we will remake the course of our rivers, where we
will tirelessly clean up our coastlines so that the fish return, where we will
slow down the deadly flood of cars that eat away at the country like ants in
an abandoned plate of stew, where we will teach according to our own
reference points, thus going to meet up with the forms of knowledge
accumulated from all over the world, where we will never again fail to help
those young people who go around in nothingness and anxiety, where we
will stop having these pointless arguments among ourselves that turn nasty.
But let’s do it, let’s propose it to all, with the calmness of those who do not
claim to be teaching others a lesson. Let’s stop thinking that our entire
crazy consumption of goods, exacerbated by the shenanigans of commerce,
can produce happiness. It’s not true. Let’s not believe that we are the most
privileged people of the Caribbean. This over-excited consumption
engenders a subterranean uneasiness, which we can nevertheless feel, a
hostility between people who do not even know why they can no longer get
along. A mediocrity that is unaware of itself. Let’s try to make the
Caribbean a healthy lung of the Earth, a persistent blue patch in the
surrounding grey, until the blue spreads everywhere. Our collective identity
is a result of this, but let’s not think that it is therefore bastardized. It is
the mark and the sign of the unpredictable, to which our imagination is
becoming accustomed. Our rhizome-identities are through with essences,
exclusivities, the rites of withdrawal. Let’s enter our own world, which also
 Measure, Immeasurability 143

means entering the world. Let’s make room for all the languages, and our
Creole language first of all, because it is an unpredictable resultant, and let’s
make room for all the langages, of the individual or the collectivity, of a poet
or a craftsman, which envisage and illustrate the immeasurable diversity of
the world. And to this Immeasurability let’s apply our Measure, which
cannot be a restriction. The measure is the sign of real independence of
thought, the gauge of a determination that will not weaken. It is not the
narrow dimension of the accepted order or of arbitrary regulations. It does
not claim to predict everything in the movement of the world or to make
ambitious plans. Our human communities have given up, let’s hope, on
five-year plans. Measure is boldness and renewal, supported. All peoples are
young in the world-totality. There are no more old civilizations that would
protect the health of the Whole, like patriarchs draped in ancient wisdom,
while other peoples would be burning, almost wild, with a youth not yet
tested. Immeasurability has shortened times and multiplied them. To be
ancient is to sense most closely the resolution of these times, although it is
unpredictable. To be ancient is to flow in unanimity into this movement of
the world. Ancientness can no longer be evaluated by a bygone age. We are
all young and ancient, on the horizons. Atavistic cultures and composite
cultures, former colonizers and colonized, oppressors and oppressed today.
We fight the oppressions in our own place, we also open onto the neigh-
bouring islands, and onto all lands. This does not mean leaving our
ancestors, either known or unknown. Those who sank to the bottom of the
Immense Waters during transportation, those who smothered the fruit of
their loins in order to save them from slavery, those who laboured on the
Plantations, who marooned in the hills. We must bring them with us as we
enter into the renewal of all things. Give a meaning to what they were,
which it is so difficult for us to imagine. Look in the face those desperate
times that haunt us. Is it necessary to summon up these times? Yes, to open
them up. And not to fall back on the old definitions. The advantage of an
island is that one can go right round it, but an even more precious advantage
is that this trip can never be finished. And see how most of the islands in
the world form archipelagos with others. The islands of the Caribbean are
among these. Every archipelagic thought is a thought of trembling, of
non-presumption, but also of openness and sharing. It does not demand
that one starts by defining Federations of States, administrative and insti-
tutional orders, it starts everywhere on its work of entangling, without
bothering to state the preliminaries. As regards our relations in the
Archipelago, let’s start with the small things, but while bearing in mind the
144 Treatise on the Whole-World

big ones. We are the higglers* of the Caribbean reality. And let’s loudly
proclaim this motto: Martinique, organic country of the world. It will be a
response not to a fashion for ecology, but to precise needs linked to the
concerns of ecology. We will adapt as we go along, and it will certainly be
a long and difficult process, our organization of work, our distribution of
resources, the equilibrium of our societies. It is a hallmark, as long as it
corresponds to a reality, which would speak to those who come to our
country, to those who would buy its products elsewhere. Yes, difficult and
long. We would have to cope with the redeployments of loss, the new habits
to create, the stormy periods of adaptation, the need to roll out progressive
change, the initial excesses and the individual and collective moments of
discouragement. But is our present situation enviable or viable? Can we
continue like this? We believe so but immediately we wonder: why this
displeasure, this anxiety within us? Isn’t the relative comfort of some
accompanied by this general malaise, which corrupts us all, and by the
absolute lack of comfort of the majority? Will we wait forever for the
reassurances and solutions coming from France, and which in this case are
not really such? And if we do not dedicate ourselves to this Utopia, will we
not anyway have to imagine another one? In what is called the global
market, the small countries save themselves by making themselves specialists
of very particular productions, that the industrial machine cannot compete
with or steal. Let’s invent these new products, the fruits of new methods.
Let’s run this risk. Our responsibility in the matter is collective, and our
action should be too. We must make our place immeasurable, that is, link
it up with the Immeasurability of the world. Let’s also look at its beauty.
My hope lies in this voice of the landscapes. The edges of our forests fade
into the cultivated lands that lose their momentum in the sands. It is a
whole repertoire in miniature. Neither the pineapples nor the bananas
really flatten their surroundings. Petite Guinée is next door to Petite
Suisse. The Hills are green and red. The great apricot trees provide shade
for the Valleys. What is just as beautiful is to find all these landscapes all
over the Archipelago, with all the possible nuances and variations. The
fabric of our countries raises its volcanoes and plunges into its ravines, sinks
under the sea and is reborn, reappears, changed but continuous with itself,
in St Lucia or Marie-Galante, Dominica or the Dominican Republic. Let’s
talk to all those who share such countries with us. And let the Creole
Caribbean talk to the world which is itself creolizing. It has brought its

* Peddlers.
 Measure, Immeasurability 145

multiplicity together into a surprisingly convergent diversity. But without

any kind of uniformity. Let’s consecrate that among us. This is not a Call,
nor a manifesto or a political programme. The Call would be, for whoever
makes it, the sign of a pre-eminence that has no place here. The manifesto
would presuppose putting oneself forward. The political programme would
not be suitable or convincing. This is a cry, quite simply a cry. Of a realizable
Utopia. If the cry is taken up by some or by all, it becomes speech. A
common song. The cry and speech work together to lift up the possibilities,
and also what we have always believed to be the impossibilities, of our
countries.
146 Treatise on the Whole-World

One returns to the place, just as one escapes from the story. Mathieu,
the one who is not Béluse, glancing accidentally at this text that I am
struggling to weave, ingenuously recommends (‘wouldn’t it be possible,
please’) that I write as ‘he’ rather than ‘I’. He likes hearing narratives,
stories. He authorizes and establishes the art of the novel. I tell him (using
‘he’) that Mathieu Béluse has come back. He has stopped running through
times because, he says, one can no longer move forward. There are people
who go to Mars and will soon go to Betelgeuse, but we do not have their
techniques. He prefers to spell out the earth, as though he were learning a
lesson from it. And if we have to go to Betelgeuse, and soon to Fomalhaut?
Mathieu Béluse consults a branch of shell ginger,* he tries to work out
the future. He learns from Marie Celat that impossible art: to inhabit
the unpredictable. He enters the archipelago. One does not cultivate this
garden, distance is not withdrawal. The Creole garden is stubborn, it takes
care of itself and its plants protect each other, like islands banding together.
And then, the defeat of time: Oriamé, Désira, Mycéa. The novel remakes
itself as marine huts. Mathieu Béluse has come back here.

* ‘L’à-tous-maux’, a plant with medicinal properties.

 Measure, Immeasurability 147

The narrative used to find its source in the troubled or measured calm
of the communitarian, in that requirement that separated it from any other
places. Its symbolic system found its meaning there.
Words have moved away from the mysteries of the imperious narrative
and from the fragmented fullness of the poem. They have abdicated the
narrow confidence of the language. It is as though, given in or fallen from
all this clashing around us, they eluded our meanings.
They no longer form planets or galaxies, each one wrapped around its
sun or its movement. They disperse themselves into infinity, before this
movement explodes and the sun becomes a giant dead star, a burnt dwarf.
In this explosion, which perhaps presages a single primitive and final
galaxy – but which one? – narrative loses its symbolic power, those layers
of meaning that supported themselves, just as the poem loses that passion
for envisaging words as a material, outside the concept.
What does this mean? For someone who sees words as nothing but a
familiar neighbourhood, too immediate dreams, the imposition, with no
further echo, of the day that passes and the night that goes on forever?
What can this mean, you who advance with no support or gulf in which
to place yourself, with no all-powerful heritage or memory, in this sparkling
of all new-born things?
148 Treatise on the Whole-World

Totalities
Creolization is forever envisaging its opposite, and the Archipelago joins
with every Switzerland.
A Switzerland? Perhaps, planned by the all-Being, which maintains
itself as being-everything.
And what would the Archipelago be? The dispersion of non-Being,
which brings together the being of the world.
The being as beings.

Being is immobile in the mountain, it has protected itself from the snow
and the impenetrable avalanche.
Non-Being no longer extinguishes the will in the happiness of passivity,
nor exacerbates it in blind thrusts. Non-Being does not mean not being.

I was there, not a Being but a painful being, immobile and stiff in this
icy downhill street of this village of the Pyrenees, with its few inhabitants.
Stuck on these old frozen cobbles, dismayed by my impossible position,
shouting to my friends in the distance to leave me alone. Until I decided to
jump onto the edge, where streaks of fresh snow at the bottom of the hedge
allowed one to hang on and walk. Then I could go down or up, as I wished.

Creolization receives and conceives of the Unique, the unthought of

Being, but it also admits the opposite.
The infinite stages of the illusory graduation are all valid, from Being to
being, from Switzerland to the Archipelago, in creolization. That amounts
to saying that one could not really conceive of a Being-as-being.

The Archipelago is wandering, from land to sea, it is open to the waves

and the dawn.
But there are also dawns on the cultivated plain, in the unmoving hills,
in the peninsula that watches over the advance of the lands and evokes the
unknown. They are inhabited. If they were not, they would deserve to be.
These human communities occupy the path, from Being to being.

There are so many identities of peoples, and of a single people when it

has undergone changes, that it would be raging madness to try to spell out
the norms. To extol every time the absolute contradiction.

Creolization is non-Being finally in action: at last the feeling that the

 Measure, Immeasurability 149

resolution of identities is not at the brink of dawn.* That Relation, that

end result of contact and process, changes and exchanges, without losing
or distorting you.
We are not told to renounce (being) in order to finally accept (the beings
of the world). No, that has not been said, or even supposed. You can escape
from that street with the frozen cobbles where you had got stuck, escape to
admire at last the surroundings and breathe the cold air.

The multi-energy of creolizations does not create a neutral field where

the sufferings of humanity would doze off; it reactivates that dizzying
expansion which undoes not differences but the old sufferings born of
difference.

This path, from Being to being, to merciful beings! We follow it without

disfiguring it.

* ‘Au bout du petit matin’: this is the first line of Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au
pays natal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1997).
150 Treatise on the Whole-World

Yes, our monuments in the Americas! Bois-caïman in Haiti, the Sierra

Maestra in Cuba, the Château Dubuc at the end of the Pointe de la
Caravelle in Martinique - of which the only remains at ground level are
buried traces of the dungeons where the arriving slaves were imprisoned -
the ruins of Saint-Pierre, the marks of cleavers on the trunks of the rubber
trees that have reappeared around Bélem and Manaus, and so on: what the
landscapes, without the help of stone or carved wood, have produced by
way of stories and memory, imperceptible but insistent.
But also, in all the spaces roundabout: the Heights of the sky losing
themselves in galaxies, the tracts of brush that encumber their own depth,
the frantic tastes of the cultivated land, the savannahs with their shadows
compressed like bonsaï trees, the sands in the desert that expand your
mind, the salt flats where you can study pure geometry, the mangroves
inextricably enlaced, the overflowing glaciers, the depths of the sea from
where the coming evening rises up, the infinite tundras that overwhelm
you, the hills that root you to the spot. Singular and similar, with for each
of them not only its word, but its langage. Not only its language, but its
music.
 Measure, Immeasurability 151

They say that creolization is an overview, after which we would gain, or

profit, from going into specifics. This is to go back to the old divisions, the
universal, the particular, etc. They do not know how to read the world. The
world does not read itself in them.
152 Treatise on the Whole-World

Ode to Stone and to Carthage*

see how the céments and the urubes have united

the village gets together where the ridge is celebrated
the wind distracts yesterday’s bean from the fig tree here

this day will come, this day will come

from the most fragile wall we have seen, below,

the trireme exhaled into the rust-red sea, and naked
run towards the entry to the Port – the sail swooning on its way

we who are the current and the swell for so many past times

is it the rock with the rough brow of the centurion

is it drinking pastis and the misused serpente

is it three times the ring that rolls on the breaking wave

listen,

urubes, cégaliers, frusques, metals and beautiful doves.

18 March 1997

* The words in italics here are commented on in the section ‘Some New Words’
(p. 157).
 • • •

The Town,
Refuge for the Voices of the World*
The Town, Refuge for the Voices of the World

We are beginning to understand that in the margins of the economic

and financial wars, which do not primarily benefit nations as such but
the multinationals whose circumference is everywhere and their centre
nowhere, the real engagements today, the harmonies and disharmonies,
the encounters and the conflicts, concern above all the cultures of peoples
and communities.
Culture has met up with politics, and the major clashes of our time are
marked by this. Politics worked towards the emergence and reinforcement
of nations, in Europe and in the expanding West. Culture manifests the
anguish and convulsion of intellectual, spiritual or moral entities when
placed spectacularly in relation with others, divergent or opposed, in what
from now on is for us the world-totality.
This is the moment to remember that the primary intention of the
International Parliament of Writers was to meet up to listen to ‘the
cry of the world’. Multiple contacts between cultures produces this
upheaval that re-forms our imaginations, and allows us to understand
that we do not abdicate our identities when we open ourselves up to
the Other, when we realize our being as a participant in a rhizome –
sparkling, fragile and threatened but hardy and obstinate – which is not
a totalitarian gathering, where everything would merge into everything
else, but a non-systematic system of relation, where we could sense the
­unpredictability of the world.

* Speech given at the Palais de l’Europe in Strasbourg, at the opening of the

Congrès du Réseau des Villes Refuges and of the International Parliament of
writers (26–28 March 1997).
154 Treatise on the Whole-World

Imagination. That is to say, art and literature.

It is literature that illustrates this movement of freeing up, which
leads from our place to the thought of the world. This is now one of the
most important subjects of literary expression. To contribute, using the
powers of the imagination, to raising up the network, the rhizome of open
identities, who talk and listen to one another.
We can understand why writers, by their very function, become the
favourite target of identitarian intolerance.

Exchange, the shared total of teachings and information on everything

that stirs up and fertilizes the thought of the world. The intellectual, the
journalist, the artist are by the same token, by their very function, the
prioritized goal of all the forces of imprisonment and exclusion.
And when they find themselves, the intellectual, the journalist, the
artist and the writer, isolated in a place of the world, it is not only their
voice that is gagged, but their life that is destroyed. The right to existence
and the right to expression are tragically merged in the same denial.

Relation, that is also a Poetics, in the active sense of the word, which
raises us up in ourselves, and solidarity, whereby we manifest that raising
up. Every network of solidarity is in this sense a true Poetics of Relation.
It may seem contradictory to use this term, a Poetics, of an enterprise,
the network of Refuge Towns, that has required and still needs so many
administrative arrangements and institutional decisions, and calls on us to
surmount so many barriers put up by custom, the rule of the ordinary or
simply habit. But I will take this risk.
For this is not only a question of a humanitarian action, although
that could have sufficed. The Refuge Town is not like a charity home, it
is involved with the guest it has chosen to welcome in relations of mutual
knowledge, of gradual discovery, of long-term exchange, which make this
enterprise a truly militant exercise, an active participation in the general
meeting ‘of giving and receiving’.

As with everything concerning the intentions or actions of the

International Writers’ Parliament, and also in accordance with the explicit
wishes of the Towns that have undertaken the setting up of this network,
none of the actions that result from it are linked to a partisan politics. It
is when it frees itself from political bias and its limitations that cultural
action most truly encounters the political dimension, which illuminates
for us both the country in which we live and the world that calls out to us.
 The Town, Refuge for the Voices of the World 155

Imagination, exchange, Relation.

A town, which can be the place of so much suffering, injustice, stifled

unhappiness, despair without horizons, then becomes, entering into the
world’s imagination and completing this exchange and enacting Relation,
the symbol and the vector of new hopes.
A town, a modern town, is a piece of land, a root identity, but not
unique and not a single root, it is also a relational identity.
A town brings together and symbolizes the region in which it is based,
but it is equally open to the systems of relations that have been woven
between the cultures of the world.
The town is regional within the nation, it is national within the system
of the world, but it returns to its particularity when it is a question of
accepting the particularity of the Other.
It ‘understands’, that is it ratifies, the set of values from which it has
come. It ‘understands’, that is it authorizes and illustrates, the relation
between the values that have come from everywhere, that it welcomes and
protects.
In this way the modern town can be the refuge of the voices of the
world.
It is to the credit of the towns of Europe that they have responded so
wholeheartedly to the call from the International Parliament of Writers
and have set up this rhizome of solidarity and freedom of expression.

Perhaps they have been inspired or helped by traditions of struggle

for their emergence, fighting for their freedom, determination to improve
living standards, traditions that go back a long way in their history.
It is my wish that they will also work together to extend this network
to other continents, to other urban communities that have fewer resources.
The rhizome must spread and multiply further afield.

Let us listen to the cry of the world.

Let us go beyond the petty obligations of the everyday, and follow the
procession of these writers and artists who have travelled far from their
homes; let us agree that they have contributed a great deal, helping us to
weave this network.

From everywhere, the mass graves and the genocides, the camps of
ethnic purification, the wars that can never be expiated and the generalized
massacres, the appeal rises up from human communities demanding to be
156 Treatise on the Whole-World

recognized in their specificity, but also, sometimes expressed by these same

oppressed and suffering communities, as in the Mexican Chiapas, the idea
that every specificity would suffer from being closed off and self-sufficient.

To speak of one’s surroundings, one’s country: to speak of the Other,

of the world.

We now know that any culture that isolates and closes itself gradually
falls into malaise and discomfort, into this imbalance that is all the more
upsetting in that one can see no plausible reason for it. The individual there
is like an overheated oven, that nothing can turn off.

Then the most terrifying thing, far worse than the yelling and hatred
face to face, is the everyday ‘normality’, calm and innocent, closed in on
itself, of the statements of exclusion and rejection of the other.
Against this background drone of horror, those who have the vocation
to speak out preserve the vivacity of the word, which they send all over the
world. It is once again to the credit of those in charge of public life to help
them to do so.

Freedom of existence, freedom of speech, freedom of creation.

 The Town, Refuge for the Voices of the World 157

Some New Words

They have formed in the fullness of writing, not in its hollows and gaps,
and it is noticeable that they are all in the plural. This is because, apart
from serpente which has its antecedent, they perhaps fear the singularity of
Being. They come together and multiply each in itself, knowing that they
are ephemeral. The beauty of the word that will soon perish. Would it not
have been better to leave them in the wandering of the poem where they
appeared, without now explaining them? To define them would already be
to kill them. The definition will turn around them.

Xamaniers – trees that produce xamanas. Trees of trees, therefore.

Arapes – ploughs for working tarmac.
Daciers – warders and magistrates with steel daggers, literally.
Salènes – campion and salines (salt flats): living and unlikely plains.
Huques – cube-shaped buildings, forming huts. Ruins, in the cold and
luxurious light of the windows.
Céments – not cement, but its magnet, which attaches in all different
ways, instead of dividing.
Urubes – the pastoral charm in Ur, the wheat-bird.
Serpente – an endless grass.
Cégaliers – in Mediterranean countries, regular clumps of cicadas,
forming sonorous roots.
Frusques – the old clothes of time, which make their wearer brusque.
Not to be confused with frusques, which has given us saint-frusquin
(belongings).
158 Treatise on the Whole-World

Indications of Most of the Places and Occasions

The Carrefour des Littératures européennes, the International Writers’

Parliament, The Centre of French and Francophone Studies at Baton
Rouge, Rutgers University, the Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie,
the Institut du Monde arabe, Tokyo University, Perpignan University,
the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe, the Université des Antilles-Guyane,
the Bibliothèque François-Mitterand, The City University of New Yor
(CUNY), the Parliament of Navarre, the University of Almeira, the
Assises de la Traduction in Arles, Columbia University, the Basque
country, New York University (NYU), the Boréales of Normandy, the
Town Hall in Lamentin.
And also the following publications: Littératures, Le Nouvel Observateur,
Yale French Studies, L’Esprit créateur, Dédale, Croissance, L’Oriflamme, Le
journal du dimanche, Les Inrockuptibles, Al Cantara, Édouard Glissant, poesia
y politica, by Diva Barbara Damato, La letteratura caraïbica francofona, by
Carla Fratta, Littératures antillaises d’aujourd’hui, edited by Cathie Delpech.
Let us also name, for the pleasure of exchange: Carminella Biondi and
Elena Pessini at Parma, Alexandre Leupin at Baton Rouge, Bernadette
Cailler in Florida, Jean-Pol Madou in Miami, Geneviève Bellugue in Paris,
Adonis the lyrical in Beirut, Michael Dash in Jamaica, Nancy Morejon in
Cuba, Celia Britton in Aberdeen, Édouard Maunick in Durban, Gérard
Delver in Guadeloupe, Henri Pied at Antilla, Jérôme Glissant on the old
road leading to Pays-mêlés, Jayne Cortez and Melvin Edwards in New
York, Thor Vilhjálmsson in Iceland, Emilio Tadini in Milan, Piva and her
Vernazza dialect, Christian Salmon in all our meetings, Jacques Coursil
in Fort-de-France, Patrick Chamoiseau at La Favorite, Alain Baudot in
Toronto.

The poem Hommage à Pierre et à Carthage has appeared in a single

manuscript edition accompanied by pastels by Sylvie Sémavoine.