OUR LIVES
AS ARCHIPELAGO
A METAPHOR
“Archipelagic thought is based on interactive, permanent relationships, including the unforeseen aspects of the world’s apparent chaos.
The archipelago is diffracted, fractal,
necessary in its totality,
fragile or potential in its unity,
passing and remaining; it is a state of the world.”
Édouard Glissant
A PROCESS
The archipelago is the very form of the contemporary world as we perceive it today. Galaxies and planets alike, ecosystems, living beings, cultures, and cities are all constellations of stable elements in constant interaction.
It is not enough to say: Long live multiplicity.
Multiplicity must be acted upon.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
ARCHIPELAGO :
A MODERN IDEA
“The term “archipelago” can be broken down into the roots “arc” (the Greek meaning “original”, “main”) and “pelago” (a Latin derivation of an earlier Greek term meaning an open sea, a pond, a gulf, even an abyss, the feeling of being on the high seas).
Archipelago is not an ancient Greek word, but a modern Italian word made from these Greek borrowings.
The elements of the word are Greek, but there is no trace of arkhipelagos in ancient or medieval Greek (the modern word in Greek is borrowed from Italian).
Archipelago thinking is a thought of testing, of intuitive temptation, which could be opposed to continental thoughts, which are above all system-based.
Édouard Glissant
THE GREAT
Edouard Glissant
Édouard Glissant was a French novelist, poet, and philosopher. He won the Prix Renaudot in 1958 for his novel *La Lézarde*. In 1992, he was a finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the Saint Lucian writer Derek Walcott won by a single vote.
Glissant is the founder of, among other things, the concepts of "Tout-monde" (All-World) and "Relation." He also rethought the notion of creolization, as well as the categories of metaphysics and the modalities of intercultural dialogue, through the lens of his relational perspective.
Best known for *Le Discours antillais* (Caribbean Discourse, 1981), Édouard Glissant authored a colossal body of conceptual and literary work, and a substantial bibliography.
From Soleil de la conscience (1956) to the Anthologie de la poésie du Tout-Monde (2010), he distinguished himself in all genres: novel, poetry, theatre, philosophical essays.
Often categorized as a postcolonial theorist, Glissant's thought defies categorization into any fixed school or movement, constantly redefining the models of a worldview in search of its own dynamism.
A Distinguished Professor of French Literature at the City University of New York (CUNY), Édouard Glissant served as Director of the UNESCO Courier from 1981 to 1988 and as Honorary President of the International Parliament of Writers in 1993.
He has received several honorary doctorates from various universities around the world (for example, the University of Bologna in 2004). He spent the majority of his academic career in the United States, first at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, and then in New York.
In 2006, he founded the Institut du Tout-Monde (Institute of the Whole World) in Paris.
WHAT FORMS
FOR WHAT WORLD
TODAY?
THE "MONDIALITE",
THE WORLD AS RELATION
OF EDOUARD GLISSANT
Excerpt from Mondialite or Les Archipels by Edouard Glissant
by Hans Ulrich Obrist (Editor), Asad Raza (Editor)
“What we call globalization, which is standardization according to the lowest common denominator, the reign of multinationals, standardization, the wild ultraliberalism of global markets (a company conveniently transfers its factories to a distant country, patients cannot buy cheaper medicines in a neighboring country), and so on, everyone can see; it is the parade of everyone's hackneyed platitudes, repeated endlessly, but it is also, all of this, the negative side of a prodigious reality that I call globality.
It projects, this globality, into the unprecedented adventure that we have all been given to experience today, and in a world which, for the first time, and so vividly, and in such an immediate, violent way, is understood as both multiple and singular, and inextricable. It is necessary for each of us to change our ways of understanding, living and acting in such a world. »
Hans Ulrich Obrist
As Glissant told me, “it was in these islands that the idea of creolization, of mixing cultures, was brilliantly realized.
Because the continents refuse mixing, while archipelagic thinking allows us to say that neither the identity of each person nor the collective identity are fixed and established once and for all."
(...)
I can change through exchange with others, without losing or diluting my sense of self. And this is what archipelagic thinking teaches us. I loved this idea. My sense of self becomes more complex and more urgent. And this idea of Glissant, of the archipelago, we have often discussed the idea that the archive of interviews should be a kind of archipelago.
The archipelago is diffracted, fractal, necessary in its totality, Fragile or possible in its unity, passing and remaining, it is a state of the world.
Édouard Glissant
An archipelagic
thought
"HERE"
EXISTS ONLY
THROUGH ELSEWHERE.
"WE" ONLY THROUGH
OTHERS.
IN OTHER WORDS
Drawing the lace that connects the different elements of the world is a stimulating, perilous and temporary exercise. This is the very object of all fundamental research.
Some have the privilege of shaping their own islands, of creating new ones.
They forget the single axes, prefer evolving, multipolar forms, the aim full of benchmarks of the progressive enrichment of reality.
Reports
To create is not to distort or invent characters or things. It’s creating new relationships between characters and things that exist and as they exist, it’s retouching reality with reality.
Robert Bresson quoted by Laplantine
Living nature
Copying the objects that make up a still life is nothing. What is important is to express the sensation that they inspire in you, the emotion that the whole arouses, the relationships between the objects represented, the specific character of each of them, modified by its relationships with the others, all intertwined like a rope or a snake.
Henri Matisse
Lumps
Its heterogeneity is that of mille-feuille, the most difficult pastry to begin, resisting the fork by its very heterogeneity.
Michel Thévoz
Essay
Archipelago thinking is a thought of testing, of intuitive temptation, which could be opposed to continental thoughts, which are above all system-based.
Édouard Glissant
Cloth
The archipelago is diffracted, fractal, necessary in its totality, fragile or possible in its unity, passing and remaining, it is a state of the world.
Édouard Glissant
Even yourself
I am made of parts that can fit into many mechanisms;
and elements that make up an infinite number of combinations.
Paul Valéry