Ravizza, Eleonora (Università degli studi di Bergamo)

Exile, errantry, connection. Edouard Glissant’s Poétique de la Relation

Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizome” has proved one of the most successful spatial concepts through which

intellectuals and writers have read the Caribbean literary and cultural space. Not a model, but rather a

geographical metaphor for mapping non-hierarchical thought and for privileging the multiple over the dual,

the rhizome can be defined as “an assemblage of connected multiplicities, without center or origin, [..]

always in process of becoming” (Sprouse 1994: 83). A rhizome does not imprison alterities because a

rhizome is, in itself, a connection of alterities.

This paper will focus on Edouard Glissant’s interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizome” in the

elaboration of what he called a “Poétique de la Relation” (“Poetics of Relation”). “Relation” is the term with

which Glissant denotes the rhizomatic, multiple relations that connect the Caribbean to the rest of the

world, connections through which also the literary text comes into being in the form of surfaces connecting

to other surfaces, discourses connected to other discourses, within a machine of sense by which continuous

processes of territorialization and deterritorialization determine endless transformations of sense. The

“relation” is, in this sense, a dynamic model for describing hybridization not only in a local, but also in a

global perspective.

Following the path traced by Glissant’s concept of “relation”, I will explore the ethical value of his poetics

and use it as a lens through which interpreting selected literary texts from a post-colonial and post-modern

context. More specifically, I will investigate how Glissant’s developed an idea of “literature du tout-monde”,

i.e. of a literature that should be able to express the singularity of specific, local experiences in the light of

their entanglement with the whole world. Embracing the thought of the totality means, for Glissant,

embracing the thought of exile and errantry, a thought that is by definition always relational and dialectic,

and at the same time concerned with social, political and historical dynamics.

Bibliographic references:

− Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans. Brian

Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2004.

− Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. By Betsy Wing. Chicago: The University of Michigan

Press, 1997

− Hitchcock, Peter. Imaginary States. Studies in Cultural Transnationalism. Urbana: University of

Illinois Press, 2003.