The concept of Relation is among the most central to all of Caribbean Critique. This chapter will argue that two models of relation have typified the field: Glissant's influential discussion of Relation from 1990 on as an aesthetic (in the encompassing sense of a sensual experiencingthe- world-as-totality taken to constitute the elemental – and perhaps unsurpassable – mode of human being) and a model common to Césaire, Sartre, Fanon, and the Glissant of the Discours antillais that perceives social relationality-initially-as alienation and structurally determined subalternality, the experience of which leads, however, to a call for a radical politics of disalienation and – for Fanon above all – revolutionary decolonization that would rework the very foundations of appearance and sensibility in any world.

This binary model of relation – aesthetic-descriptive versus revolutionary modes – thus implies a further three-way distribution of relationality. In contrast to an aesthetic satisfaction and pleasure to be taken in the world as it actually exists, the alternative apperception of the world as radically unsatisfying and alien, a forceful summons to critique and transformation rather than contemplation, implies the existence of an initial primary experience of relation as what one might call, policing – the structuring of social order by various forms of legitimate violence – that precedes a militant relationality of emancipatory politics. Fanon's descriptions of the lived experience of the black subject (in Peau noire, masques blancs) and of the structurally alienating effects of the colonial social space (in the opening pages of Les Damnés de la terre) undoubtedly stand as the pre-eminent critique of such colonial and racial policing.

Consequently, one arrives at the following outline of the Caribbean Critique of relation: an initial critique of alienated or policed relationality, the disarticulation of which is, almost by definition, an imperative for all figures of the Caribbean critical tradition from Vastey to the early Glissant. Following this initial deconstructive analysis, however, two paths forward appear: a Nietzschean antipolitics of epicurean delight that finds its principal depiction in Glissant's late writings, which I will call a Caribbean expressive corporealism, and the constitution of a militant subject, articulated by figures such as Louverture, Césaire, and Fanon, a Caribbean materialist dialectic.