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Abstract
The article examines Glissant’s idea of generosity against Derrida’s non-concept of absolute hospitality through their different approaches to language and translation, further illuminated by recent theoretical contributions by decolonial critics and theorists from the Global South. Generosity as the recognition of the Other’s innate nobility manifests a Relation without ethics since the latter presupposes an exchange subtended by the principles of commensurability and transparency. Underpinning his reflection on the strangers’ co-presence in the world is the “improbable” case of creole languages which, far from being mere by-products of the physical labor forcibly extracted from their speakers, or operating as contingent and disposable tools, became enduring idioms that bear testimony to the material conditions and the historical context of their creation while continuing to bear the traces of their coming-into-being. In the wake of the abyssal experience of the Middle Passage, Glissant’s proposition invites us to consider generosity as the model for an incommensurable and untranslatable Relation epitomized in his poetic creed: “Je te parle dans ta langue, et c’est dans mon langage que je t’entends.”
Notes
1 “Ce qui départage l’étranger, c’est qu’il parle (ou qu’on le fait parler) en étranger, même si sa langue de communication est la ‘nôtre’” (Benhaïm Citation2021, 32).
2 It is interesting to note that in his 1993 conversation with Glissant at the Parlement international des écrivains, Derrida exemplifies the general issue about “les phénomènes d’autodéconstruction” by turning to the specific example of colonization or rather of “le principe colonisateur” in which he identifies “aussi une négativité, un principe d’autodestruction ou d’auto-contestation.” This philosophème of “the colonizing principle beyond colonization” appears in his Monolingualism of the Other (Derrida Citation1998), also uttered in 1993 as a lecture delivered in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at Glissant’s invitation, and again in the 2002 volume published in English, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy: Right to Philosophy I where, couched in the language of deconstruction, a subtle shift occurs from Derrida’s reflection on the onto-political inexorability of monolingualism to an illocutory, action-oriented statement about cultivating multilingualism: “Every monolingualism and monologism restores mastery or magistrality. It is by treating each language differently, by grafting languages onto one another, by playing on the multiplicity of languages and on the multiplicity of codes within every linguistic corpus that we can struggle at once against colonization in general, against the colonizing principle in general (and you know that it exerts itself well beyond the zones said to be subjected to colonization), against the domination of language or domination by language” (Citation2002a, 105). On a chiastic reading of this philosophical dialogue, see Panaïté Citation2021.
3 For an extensive analysis, see Drabinski Citation2019.
4 I prefer in this case to cite the French text as it carries a stronger semantic charge.
5 From an interview with Jacques Derrida (“This Strange Institution Called Literature” Citation1992, 38).
6 For the crucial function of paradox in Glissant’ thinking, see Wiedorn Citation2018.
7 This new syntax mutates also in the form of various metaphorical visions of being, all consistent with Glissant’s ontological project: Creolization of being, opacity of being, archipelago of being, and the orality of being, to name but a few.
8 Ian Baucom proposes that, even in the apocalyptic or abysmal event of colonization, for Glissant, “exchange must be apprehended, not only as a word for loss but as a word for gain. Exchange, in this sense, once more names a form of substitution, though here what replaces exceptionality is not fungibility but relation, where relation is [.] a word for those ‘transverse’ forms of culture, identity, and solidarity that emerge from the act of holding to, enduring, relating, and avowing our (present’s) relational complicity with modernity’s most violent scenes of exchange” (Citation2005, 311).
9 See Headley Citation2012.
10 The sentence that gives this article its title fosters this interplay: “Je te parle dans ta langue, et c’est dans mon langage que je t’entends” (Glissant Citation1997a, 123).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Oana Panaïté
Oana Panaïté is Ruth N. Halls Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Indiana University—Bloomington. Her publications include Des littératures-mondes en français. Écritures singulières, poétiques transfrontalières dans la prose contemporaine (2012), The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French (2017), and Necrofiction and the Politics of Literary Memory (2022). A monograph entitled Fictions of Race in Contemporary Literature: French Writers, White Writing, co-authored with Étienne Achille, is forthcoming in 2024 with Oxford University Press.