One of the greatest writers of the late twentieth century, Édouard Glissant’s body of work covers multiple genres and addresses many cogent contemporary problems, such as borders, multiculturalism, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and global humanities.
Édouard Glissant, Philosopher is the first study that maps out this writer’s entire work in relation to philosophy. Glissant is reputed to be a ‘difficult writer;’ however, Alexandre Leupin demonstrates the clarity and coherence of his thinking. Glissant’s rereading of Western philosophy entirely remaps its age-old questions and offers answers that have never been proposed. In doing so, Glissant offers a new way to think about questions that are at the forefront of Global Humanities today: identity, race, communities, diasporas, slavery, nation-states and nationalism, aesthetics, ethics, and the place and function of poetry and art in a globalized world. This book will elucidate Glissant’s theoretical writings, not only in England and in America but also in the anglophone Caribbean, Africa, and India.
Tabla de materias
Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Translator’s Note
1. ‘The immense foliage of a Louisiana oak, like a flattened palaver tree’
2. ‘Repetition is not an unnecessary duplication’
3. ‘I do not reject, I establish correlation’
4. ‘This need to go beyond one’s own subjectivity’
5. ‘Everything is in everything’
6. ‘Universality has no language’
7. ‘Bounds, breaks and sudden leaps’
8. ‘Only the poets’
9. ‘The beauty of beauty’
10. ‘The dispute, one of the safest and oldest reinforcements of thought’
11. ‘We do not name Relation’
12. ‘Now there are only beings’
13. ‘The slave is the one who does not know, but who desires with all his strength to know’
14. ‘I change things, through exchanging with the other, and yet without destroying or distorting myself ‘
15. ‘And so we bring down (as if literally) the letter of the world’
16. ‘Imagine a thousand birds taking flight over an African lake’
17. ‘The continuity of the living is a spiral that does not fear to be interrupted’
18. ‘Yes, yes, everything is alive’
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Sobre el autor
Alexandre Leupin is Professor Emeritus in French Studies at Louisiana State University. He is the Founder and Codirector (with Charles Forsdick) of the Glissant Translation Project, which has already published three translations, among them
The Baton Rouge Interviews, coauthored by Glissant and Leupin.
Andrew Brown previously taught French at the University of Cambridge and is currently a freelance translator of French philosophy and social thought, including works on or by Sartre, Barthes, and Derrida. His books include
A Brief History of Biographies: From Plutarch to Celebs.