“It could end up being obscure, which would perhaps not make me unhappy, if you were willing to be my accomplices in obscurity.”
—Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse
How do we approach the obscure? The Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant once remarked, “we clamor for the right to opacity for everyone,” invoking a concept which takes on many forms throughout his diverse body of work. But what did he mean by this? The reception of this claim has perhaps been equally enigmatic: some have interpreted it as an ethical imperative to protect alterity and cultural diversity, while others have taken it as a defense of writing in a cryptic philosophical style, as a proclamation of collective and universal struggle, or as a historical tether to Blackness which has its origins in the abyssal history of the transatlantic slave trade. We will see how each of these claims is grounded in Glissant’s thought as we come to our own conclusions, both reading for his concept of opacity and observing how it has appeared elsewhere. Starting off by defining opacity as an attempt to approach problems of the unknown, we will quickly drift off course in Glissant, realizing this is not really his concern. Given the prevailing tendency to represent thought itself in terms of clarity, to stage philosophy as a drama in which the transparent light of reason vanquishes opacity, we will also have to reckon somewhat dialectically with Glissant’s characterization of transparency. Approaching the question from the other side, how is transparency fundamentally reliant on opacity, in spite of their apparent antagonisms? Thus, this course is an invitation to grapple with both the potential affordances and the inevitable setbacks of thinking with opacity, asking what it might mean to ground speculation on its unstable terrain as we think about various topics including decoloniality, resistance, and approaching difficult texts. After Fredric Jameson, then, this course wagers to take obscurity as our object of study, to define “its specific quality and structure... and to compare [it] with other forms of verbal opacity,” rather than “resolving [its] immediate difficulties back into the transparency of rational thought.” Through its appearance across fields including Black studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and strains of political thought, we will consider opacity as potential incompleteness, negativity, evasiveness, illegibility, incoherence, and excess. This course will be taught assuming no familiarity with Glissant or his work, but his thought can be challenging—thus some familiarity with concepts/debates/authors in relevant fields will be helpful—however, I intend to make the course as accessible as possible.
Lecture 1: Introduction: Glissant’s philosophy of opacity
This session introduces the topic of opacity at first generally and then more specifically in the work of Glissant. I introduce Glissant’s work in its historical and philosophical context before working through some of his key concepts and outlining the discussions to come in future sessions.
Readings:
- Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, “For Opacity”
- Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, “Introduction” & “Introductions”
Lecture 2: Historicizing, politicizing, aestheticizing opacity
This session relates opacity with the notion of the abyss and abyssal descent in Glissant as pertaining to the atlantic slave trade, which is central to Rizvana Bradley’s argument about the historicity, the ahistoricity, and perhaps the antehistory of Blackness. We will carefully work through this argument together. We’ll also contrast Hortense Spillers’s notion of the “Hieroglyphic of the Flesh” with the unsteady form of historicity Bradley describes. Then, putting Glissant, Bradley, and Denise Ferreira da Silva in conversation, we’ll look at their critique of Western Marxism via Žižek and Badiou.
Readings:
- Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, “The Open Boat”
- Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Fractal Thinking” & Rizvana Bradley, “Poethics of the Open Boat”
- Selections from Rizvana Bradley, Antaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form
- Denise Ferreira da Silva & Rizana Bradley, “Four Theses on Aesthetics” (optional)
- Selections from Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (optional)
Lecure 3: Opacity and psychoanalysis
This session compares opacity with principles which abound in various iterations of psychoanalytic theory, ranging from the unknowability of the self to irreducibility, negativity, enigma, and the opacity of the signifier. We’ll discuss the affordances of opacity for making psychoanalytic arguments, along with points of tension between psychoanalysis and Glissant’s project at large.
Readings:
- Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, “The Unconscious, Identity, and Method”
- Selections from Joan Copjec: Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, “Introduction: Structures Don’t March in the Streets,” & (Optional:) Chapter 2: “The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan ”
- Selections from David Mariott, Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being
- Selections from Avgi Saketopoulou: Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia
- Selections from Lauren Berlant & Lee Edelman, Sex, Or the Unbearable
- Selections from Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself
Lecture 4: Transparency vs. opacity, or the resistance of opacity
As surveillance and logistical capitalism abound logics of visibility, what happens to opacity? This session looks at how opacity has been theorized to offer resistance against hegemonic forms of transparency. We’ll consider how “zones of opacity” have been thought to represent both the materiality and rhythms of everyday life along with their disruption.
Readings:
- Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, “Transparency and Opacity”
- Selections from Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century” Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times
- Selections from Ferdinand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800
- Selections from Tiqqun, The Cybernetic Hypothesis
- Selections from Byung Chul-Han, The Transparency Society
- Selections from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, All Incomplete
Lecture 5: Conclusion: opacity in relation?
This session looks to recap some of the ideas from earlier in the course in context of Glissant’s broader argument in Poetics of Relation. We’ll look at opacity with respect to concepts of relation and éclat to discuss how aesthetics are at work in this text. Because the topics proposed for this course are broad yet dense, we can also use this session as a chance to answer lingering questions to complete prior discussions, or to look further into optional readings.
Readings:
- Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, “That That”
- Fred Moten, “consent not to be a single being”