Beginning in the Middle: Deleuze, Glissant, and Colonial Difference

Abstract

This essay reads Rosi Braidotti's philosophical nomadism from a decolonial perspective with the goal of uncovering the irreducible colonial difference which underlies the Eurocentric ontological vision embedded in Braidotti's reading of Gilles Deleuze. In particular, I read Edouard Glissant in tandem with Deleuze through the notion of the ‘middle’, a key concept which grounds the three thinkers' ontology of multiplicity. To this end, I borrow Nelson Maldonado-Torres' Fanonian critique of Eurocentric ontology and show how Braidotti fails to escape from the trap of Eurocentrism due to her inability to capture the abyssal and totalitarian character of coloniality imprinted in the cry of the damné. Against Braidotti's simplistic misreading of Glissant as a future-oriented constructivist, I argue that the enigmatic trope of Relation in Glissant opens up at the middle space of groundlessness constituting the ontological edifice of the colonial subject: revealing the abyssal middle in which the ineffable experience of shared suffering never stops haunting the freeing knowledge of relation.

Notes

¹The ongoing and growing debate on the Deleuze–Glissant connection is represented by a number of literary critics such as Peter Hallward, Simone Bignall, Lorna Burns, Chris Bongie, and Nick Nesbitt.

²Deleuze's relation to the One and the many has been subject to controversy ever since Alain Badiou suggested that Deleuze, in fact, does not reverse Platonism, but instead promotes a ‘Platonism of the virtual’. Badiou maintains that Deleuze is not a thinker of multiplicity since Deleuze relentlessly underscores that everything exists on One ontological level alone. However, Badiou's reading of Deleuze has become itself the subject of controversy as his interpretation of Spinoza's Univocity of Being can be seen as problematic and thus, the source of his misinterpretation of Deleuze (see Widder 2001; May 2004).

³Braidotti acknowledges that the notion of sustainability (the containment of the other) is an important ethical question and risk lurking in nomadic philosophy. However, the questions of boundaries, limits, and costs of ‘becoming’ remain as a mere rhetorical question without being answered as she does not explore these questions any further (see Braidotti 2006: 158).

Additional information

An Yountae is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Drew University in Philosophical Theology. Born in Seoul and raised in Buenos Aires, his main research focuses on the intersection between continental philosophy and postcolonial theory, particularly concerning issues of ethics, colonial trauma, globalization, and relational theology.