Édouard Glissant’s Relation and Chaos-Monde in the Era of Covid

Abstract

Édouard Glissant’s death precedes the Covid crisis by about a decade. Nevertheless, his description of global communities as highly interconnected and chaotic is eerily prescient in its portrayal of a world highly susceptible to a pandemic, and the concepts that he develops are effective in elucidating the cultural impact of such a crisis. This essay seeks to utilize ideas from the philosophy of Glissant to examine the Covid crisis, focusing on the notions of Relation and chaos-monde that he articulates in Poétique de la relation (1990) and Traité du tout-monde (1997), including his appropriation of Chaos Theory. This analysis will ponder the following questions: What are the implications of the viral spread for Glissant’s notion of Relation? Given Glissant’s account of the Internet in Poétique de la relation and Traité du tout-monde, what does he suggest about the sudden shift towards cyberspace and its consequences for relations and the Relation? What are the implications of the pandemic for the distinction that Glissant makes in La Cohée du lamentin between mondialisation (hegemonic, hierarchical standardization) and mondialité (plural modes of exchange conducive to diversity)? Finally, to what extent do Glissant’s writings present a potential means of utilizing the Relation and chaos-monde to overcome crises such as Covid?

Keywords:

• Édouard Glissant
• Covid
• Relation
• Chaos-Monde
• Chaos Theory
• Poétique de la relation

Notes

1 London, Penguin, 2008.

2 “In 1986, during a night when I was driving in my car at 15 miles per hour in a snowstorm, I turned on the radio. On an NPR station, they were interviewing a man named James Gleick. He was talking about a new science called Chaos. The theme interested me greatly, because I had a solid background in mathematics and he was talking about Benoît Mandelbrot and his fractal mathematics. That interview was an illumination for me. Right away I thought that everything I had learned in my life had now been uttered with the theory of Chaos. And so emerged The Repeating Island” (Antoni).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roxanna Curto

Roxanna Curto is Associate Professor of French and Spanish and Chair of the Department of French and Italian at the University of Iowa. In her research, she explores the representation of cultural elements such as technology and sports in literature from the French- and Spanish-speaking worlds. She is the author of Inter-tech(s): Colonialism and the Question of Technology in Francophone Literature (U of Virginia P, 2016). Her second book project, Writing Sport: The Stylistics and Politics of Athletic Movement in French and Francophone Literature considers aspects of physical culture in literature written in French from Europe, Africa, North America and the Caribbean. She recently co-edited the volume, Pour le Sport: Physical Culture in French and Francophone Literature (Liverpool UP, 2021).