I. Irigaray, Place, and Origin: The Womb and La Mère

According to Irigaray, to think one's origin, one must return to what signifies the place of origin in Western thought—the womb. Born into postwar Europe, her era's philosophical voices meditate on a declining continent wrecked by the violence of its capacity to dehumanize those labeled “other.” While reading the philosophical interlocutors her peers read, and reading her peers, she engages a unique analysis in which she inverts the scope of time, beginning with Freud and moving backward to Plato. Her specular trope is deliberately suggestive of a vaginal speculum, a device infamous for its perfection as it was horrifically tested on enslaved Black women, many of whom were tortured and died due to infections and the unsanitary and degrading conditions of forced experimentation. Although Irigaray powerfully captures the sexual subtending of speculative subjectivity beyond the grasp of Western philosophy's lens, she misses the overt racial legacy of the speculum itself. Specifically, she fails to analyze how metaphors like “dark,” “black,” and “abyss” signify the female sex as wanton in not only its failure to be the masculine Phallus but also to adhere to the conditions of Whiteness. As Frantz Fanon supposes, “In Europe, evil is symbolized by the black man” and while “the Jew is killed or sterilized . . . [t]he black man, however, is castrated” (Fanon Reference Fanon and Philcox2008, 165; 140). The castrated black man is attacked at the level of his corporeality rather than his race, which means he is like a girl/woman with no/thing to see. I note that the ways colonizers invert masculine/feminine sexualities toward their labor-supply needs fray sexuation and the human/nonhuman divide. Irigaray's attention to the specular inversion misses the multiple ways by which the sexuation of people who are black(ened) and nativize(d) via the ontological void and assigned the moral shroud of evil—which being labeled sexually deviant, physically dis-abled exacerbates—may signal other ontological frames of living that better expose the way white phallogocentrism uses these people to sharpen its relief and, hence, the need for an epochal shift.Footnote ⁴ One cannot map Black masculine and feminine onto a universal sexuation as both are voided into the darkness of the unseen, illegitimate, and irrational (and as such morally reprehensible) as they remain hypervisible. She fails to articulate how the project of sexuation relies on darkening as a necessary condition to reveal its failure to become. For example, in Speculum, she explicitly uses the subtitle “A Very Black Sexuality” (Irigaray Reference Irigaray and Gill1985a, 66–73) without analyzing Western philosophy's conflation of lightness with being.Footnote ⁵ As Speculum is an explicit analysis of Hegelian sexuation and Lacanian psychosexual theory, she misses both theorists' racist underpinnings as she identifies their reliance upon a singularity of metaphysics that fails to attend to difference as difference. Her use of the abyss, vagina, womb, water, and air rely on dark or invisible conceptions—intended to subvert the form/matter binary and the gaze of Western empirical knowledge attainment—and remain a literal “black spot” in her vantage.Footnote ⁶

What may be productive in her work, I suggest, is her shift—to pursue the dark places, the places where sight cannot locate what is, where silence indicates a residual echo of utterance yet to be deciphered, in the fluid rather than the solid materials of philosophy—leaves open an analysis of Black subjectivity as potently real and, importantly, unavailable for appropriation. By refiguring touch, smell, taste, and all the bodily sensations that actively tell us about the plurality of a vital world and how we ought to share it, I deploy Irigaray's work as an exposure of the Western reliance on visual hue and acknowledge writers such as Evelynn Hammonds, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Sylvia Wynter who interrogate how the essentialization of black(ened) people remains linked to racialized structures of sense-making. As many feminist readers know, Irigaray's robust critique of the universality of Western philosophy is to insist on two rather than One + One + One, a false diversity that remains bound to an orbital Sameness of the One. Sexuate difference, I suggest, is not an essentialization of women but pertains to a generative, anti-essentialist thinking about life and its unfolding fecundity and evolving difference.Footnote ⁷ But the condition of greater diversity and more intricate difference is predicated on the existence of at least two (Irigaray Reference Irigaray and Anderson2001, 6), and her notion of two is founded on a postulated subjectivity that is uncountable and uncontainable (Jones Reference Jones2011, 230–32). The immeasurable and incomputable posture of her difference offers those committed to theorizing beyond antiblackness a way to engage her work.

For Irigaray, the womb signifies the inversion of Plato's cave—one seeking enlightenment by returning to the passage and back to the source of darkness from which one began surrounded by fluids, a body within a woman's body (Irigaray Reference Irigaray and Gill1985a, 243–47). Philosophy has signified the womb as a variety of motifs, including the khôra, the matrix of primordial beginning (Glissant Reference Glissant and Wing1997, 6; Irigaray Reference Irigaray2012, 101). Khôra becomes an important conceptual term for both Plato and Heidegger, and it is Heidegger—and his engagement with the Greeks—that Irigaray chooses as one of her principal interlocutors. Although for Heidegger, it is the house of language that speaks to us and in its house we dwell—thinking we have built it—language conditions the human and their being, altering the one who builds. However, as with most houses, nostalgia is constantly lurking for meaning and being lost through time and the present moment that can never retrieve the past. Language remains a quintessential focus for Irigaray, but it is the nostalgia of the womb, the first dwelling she detects as the buried homage, a derelict and forgotten first place of elemental being that is prior to any built dwelling. She suspects that Heidegger's infatuation with language causes him to forget the condition of language itself—air (Irigaray Reference Irigaray and Mader1999). In the human experience, air is first given in the dwelling of the womb through the elemental passage between mother and fetus. Irigaray suggests that Heidegger's remembrance of language through absence remains rooted in the earth, forgetting the relation of air and the invisible that is necessary for his terre paternelle dwelling. From the first air we receive via our mother to the first breath we take, we enact a process of birthing ourselves into being, says Irigaray (Irigaray Reference Irigaray2017, 1). Her maneuver toward autonomy in one's birth, I read, is a deliberate move away from the discursive reduction of the female body. To birth oneself is to forge a new relationship not bound by nostalgia to the maternal body as object. In the birthing process, the elemental connection—air and water—between mother and fetus circulates in the distinction of their relation. Under the logic of patriarchy and the psychoanalytic diagnosis of what ails Western culture and thinking, the child longs to return to a false Oneness, to occupy the maternal body as the last memory of shared elemental connection, hence the nostalgia for another womb (Irigaray Reference Irigaray, Burke and Gill1993a, 50).Footnote ⁸ The search for one's homeland is a search for terre maternelle, which remains buried under this signification of a static matter/mater(nal)/land quest.

The vaginal opening to the womb, according to Freud's analysis, can be likened to a black hole, nothing or “no thing” to see, a space of darkness not unlike the dark continent (Irigaray Reference Irigaray and Gill1985a, 19), he analogizes. In Freud's conflation of the vagina, the dark continent, and nothing to see, we hear the psychoanalytic subtext of a woman's sexual organs associated with blackness, which signifies nothingness. Within this schema, woman as blackness has no past and functions as a place for the origin of man, an envelope for his becoming. The abyssal subjectivity of a woman reduces to a signification of water/glass/refraction (289)Footnote ⁹ as the mother (la mère) is doubled by the sea (la mer), both reflections of man's trembling and nostalgia. Later, I return to this doubling of mother and sea with the abyss.

In examining how things exist—being or not being—Western physics and metaphysics, observes Irigaray, turn on Aristotle's sexualized and hierarchical metaphor that privileges masculine concepts of form over feminine concepts of matter. Within this system, Irigaray states, female sexuality appears only as an “undertone” (Irigaray Reference Irigaray1977, 64) and a supposed lack of qualities that makes the female truly female. Irigaray paradoxically observes that within Aristotle's rendering, “Woman for her part remains in unrealized potentiality. . . . Or perhaps her form has to be seen—paradoxically—as mere privation? . . . She is both one and the other. . . . She is equally neither the one nor the other” (Irigaray Reference Irigaray and Gill1985a, 165). Rebecca Hill observes how Irigaray's analysis renders woman as both potentiality and privation, thus violating Aristotle's principle of noncontradiction. As such, Hill observes,

It is the simultaneity of being and not being that confounds the binary opposition and still leaves woman without any specificity (formless privation and unrealizable potential).

Denise Ferreira da Silva counters that in the modern Western imagination, life has a positive value of (1) and blackness signifies no value (-1). However, blackness as matter without form (0) evokes an incalculable possibility:

Da Silva offers several mathematical equations of blackness as negativity (-1) and without form (0) in order to indicate a representation out of Kantian determinacy and Hegelian dialectics. Instead, da Silva divides (1) life by blackness (0) to reveal a mathematical error. The error indicates why matter and blackness indicate a liberating connection; it is worth quoting da Silva at length:

Indeed, as Wynter suspects, Irigaray's maneuver to position sexuate difference as capable of undoing such an ontological project ignores the power of race and the necessity of the “undertone” of blackness within its own schematic composition. In the epochal shift from the religious to evolutionary, secular, biocentric Man, “the primary code of difference now became that between ‘men’ and ‘natives,’ with the conditional ‘male’ and ‘female’ distinctions now coming to play a secondary—if nonetheless powerful—reinforcing role within the system of symbolic representations” (Wynter Reference Wynter, Davies and Fido1990, 358). Irigaray misses this shift of the sociogenic conditions of the symbolic, but her project is useful in that she theorizes mechanisms by which the plenum of matter (blackness) and the contradiction of potentiality and privation of matter (maternal-feminine) may engage the dominating determinacy and dialectical telos of Western philosophy. She uses two motifs: the negative and the interval; in this essay, I focus on the latter.

For Aristotle, Hill instructs that difference is primarily subordinate to identity, and differentiation signals only the identity of substance (Hill Reference Hill2014). The interval functions as a threshold, a passage to figure an elsewhere outside of sameness—it does not escape phallogocentrism; it unravels an opening and possibility of place within place (Irigaray Reference Irigaray, Burke and Gill1993a, 49). The locomotion to this interval's passage between and at play is relation moved by desire. Desire wants to overtake the other, and the interval protects what I read developed throughout Irigaray's oeuvre as a vertical (up-down) self-affection or even an auto-poiesis of one's own erotic desire. As woman has been without form, but a substance for form, a trace in the annals of philosophy, affection for the she/mater/matter who persists becomes the first gesture of becoming—the relation with one's own making that conditions other relations. This includes subjectivities of paradoxical positionality, being both and neither. All this requires a spatiotemporal threshold within/between from which difference as difference emerges. For Irigaray, relation brings the feminine-maternal out of its excessive elsewhere and locates a real that does not collapse within the form–matter binary. Irigaray's move, ostensibly, is to surpass the question of a clear metaphysics of being by prioritizing relation as a concept that precedes and exceeds the contradiction of both being and nonbeing that is woman's place in the system of Western ontology. Her dialectic is not one of contraries but of difference.

However, Wynter and da Silva delineate how blackness as matter without form affirms its own poiesis and poethics, and they with other writers signal a legacy whereby they decipher their own intervals of survival, identity, and thought without reference to White universality and its vice grip of reason (da Silva Reference da Silva2014; Wynter Reference Wynter, Broeck and Ambroise2015). Evelynn Hammonds analogizes that black holes and their densities of matter confined to small spaces (which sounds much like the conditions blackened people in colonizing countries) are often construed as voids but give evidence of their emanating energy as they distort other visible bodies (Hammonds Reference Hammonds1994). I turn to Glissant's work as an archetype of such work that creates an interval for blackness and the (w)holes in which Black lives converge with effects that matter for Diversity and the Whole-World.Footnote ¹⁰

II. Glissant, Place, and Origin: The Womb-Tomb and La Mer

Édouard Glissant also returns to place and origin, specifically the island of Martinique and the Antillanité consciousness associated with a “people born of creolization.” Born two years before Irigaray, Glissant traveled to Paris, influenced by similar European thinkers to study with peers like Deleuze and Guattari, reading Plato and Hegel. Charles de Gaulle would label him a dissident and keep him under virtual house arrest, but he would later return to the city to work. Like his theory, his influences and those he influenced were multiple, including, importantly, the members of the Afro-Caribbean intellectual movement, in dialogue with Hispanophone, Lusophone, and Francophone, or Francographic (Little Reference Little2001) scholars, grappling with questions of memory and trauma, while forging new imaginations. They, too, are writing beyond a false binary that situates their work only in correspondence to European colonial hegemony. Glissant's contemporaries—Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant—query the fragmentary and overlapping stories of their origin without the guiderails of uniformity in the telling. The nostalgia and lack of nostalgia for Africa as a continent will be an ambivalent specter. Like Heidegger, languages—in their polyphonic and mixed varieties—will be analyzed as a diversifying force that co-constitutes subjectivity. With a plurality of origins, with trauma destabilizing any pretense toward memory-precision, Glissant's meditations on an abyssal subject double as a motif for what has been lost in the darkness of the boat amid the water and the incalculable of what is present in the fragmentary remainder.

Glissant uses several terms to signify a constellation of concepts meant to dislodge the “all-encompassing world of cultural Sameness” (Glissant Reference Glissant and Michael Dash1989, 97) that courses through the neo-plantations of the Americas. They include creolization, chaos-monde, Tout-monde, diversity, and Relation. These terms, in various ways, signal breaks or fissured/fissuring islands of difference in identity, language, art, and thought that are multiplying and toward which the world is moving and of which each is necessary for world totality. He describes sameness as requiring “fixed Being” or “sublimated difference”; in contrast, he posits diversity as “becoming . . . accepted difference” (98) and “Immeasurability of immeasurability” (Glissant Reference Glissant and Britton2020a, 60). For Irigaray, an incalculable, asymmetrical two is the condition of a rupture with the One. For Glissant, diversity with its spatial immeasurability of depth and extension can fissure the solidity of Oneness.

The womb of Glissant's origin, he writes, begins in the Middle Passage, in the dark belly of a boat skidding through the amniotic waters of the Atlantic Ocean, extracted from West Africa and willed into slavery by a unitary, European, atavistic culture. This womb of the boat becomes a tomb, dehumanizing death meant to cease the subjectivity of its captives. Instead, a “multiplicity of anti-slavery will” (Diawara Reference Diawara2011, 5) is born. The boat/womb/tomb is headed toward an unknown archipelago, an appearing of land, part of the world made possible by the surrounding water that constantly diffracts and shifts the geography and region; the sea is a liquid mass of movement signifying the speed, force, and unpredictability of the Whole-World. Like Irigaray's analysis of la mère/la mer, the sea diffracts and refracts into a polyvalence of identity, obscuring origin and terre paternelle. Of the slave ship, he says, “This is where the peoples of the Caribbean are truly born, and all those transplanted peoples of African descent” (Glissant Reference Glissant, Stovall and Den Abbeele2003, 111). To remix Irigaray's notion of birth, these enslaved peopledid birth themselves into the world, but now they are in the belly of a horrific renaissance. Slave traders, functioning like antimothers—twisted midwifery doulas—by blood and water, attempt to rebirth humans into enslaved property. The boat cradles a process meant to torture and dehumanize. The passage, like a gestation cycle, has a finite period concluding with a cutting of the umbilical cord that connects one to former natality and identity.

The people on the boat are from two different waters: the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. Glissant characterizes cultures surrounding the Mediterranean as ones that concentrate, giving “rise to a universalizing expression of rationality or spirituality.” The Caribbean is, to them, a passage between the continent and the comparative “dust” of archipelagos, a one-way stream by which a culture can extend its monoculture. But for Glissant, the Caribbean is a diffracting place of Relation, of diversity, of multiple slipstreams that lead to new encounters that are possible when one leaves the continent-reality and experiences the archipelago-reality. To become aware of such a reality, a new kind of thought must emerge from what he calls continental thought, namely, archipelago thought. Continental thought, or pensée continentale is “heavy, dense, sure of itself, magnificent and sumptuous” (108). However, he lingers on the lacuna he finds in the aperture of the terrain that sustains his capacity toward pensée archipelagique—the capacity to think paradoxically in ways so one may wander the plantation of universality without getting lost within it (Glissant, Reference Glissant and Wing1997, 131). The precarious, insular certitude of continental mass makes it vulnerable to the fissures of the world's archiplagoes, rendering even the continent a cluster of archipelagos.

He describes archipelago thought as “the thought of the archipelago, of the set of islands, which is a fragile, fragmentary, trembling thought, unsure of itself, but which is . . . best suited by addressing today's problems of the world totality” (Glissant Reference Glissant, Stovall and Den Abbeele2003, 108). For Glissant the world's totality qua continental thought is of the world as an unshakable unity. His version of totality is “multiplicity in totality is totally diversity,” and he counters that “the idea of totality alone is an obstacle to totality” (Glissant Reference Glissant and Wing1997, 192), undoing Hegelian totality. To think totality as total diversity requires a mode of thinking that Michael Wiedorn identifies as paradoxical thinking (Wiedorn Reference Wiedorn2018, 1–34) and suggests the paradoxical move is one Glissant, self-referencing his given name, deploys with slippery ease, gliding away from positivist statements while dropping them as renderings meant to release the poetics of philosophy, or philosophy as poetics. However, these glistening, slippery, poetic philosophical diversities are also not apolitical, which I return to in section III.

According to Glissant, the world is becoming more compositeFootnote ¹¹ and less atavistic, as local regions erupt like tiny archipelagos that yield unpredictable results beyond hybridity. In contrast, atavistic cultures rely on continental thought, he says, and are decomposing while creolization is growing ever so tenderly (Glissant Reference Glissant, Stovall and Den Abbeele2003, 113, note 2). As he describes it, creolization is a process that retains specificity of particulars while avoiding collapse into a universal global relation of identity. The risk for composite cultures is to shift their tenderness toward a nostalgia for the forms of legitimacy that atavistic cultures stake through genèses and filial succession—to seek the mater in matter. To think like an archipelago, one must leave the retrenchment of self-sufficient thinking, says Glissant, “but of relativity, the fabric of a great expanse, the relational complicity with the new earth and sea. It does not tend toward the One but opens out onto diversity” (Glissant Reference Glissant2008, 81).

For Irigaray, one fails to become lost in this diversity because one may return to the self and the interval safeguards subjects. For Glissant, aesthetics is the interval, the liminal space that is both paradoxically concrete and abstract, universal and particular, and by which the process of creolization shifts from a deconstructive move to an affirmation of identity without binary collapse. For Irigaray, sexuate difference is the antiprinciple that reveals symmetries and asymmetries, the latter yielding far more fecund spatiotemporal multiplicities. For Glissant, Relation, that is, conceiving of diversity in its real and constantly changing presence, is the strategy by which the multiplicity of difference remains at play without collapsing into a false universal.

Such a diversity requires new modes of wandering, nomadic in the best sense. Glissant shifts the meditation on thinking and speaking away from the substance of thought and speech and toward its motion or movement. The accent is on meandering movement (ex-stasis, marronage, flight, escape) within a specific geographical zone that such a with-ing entails (Dash Reference Dash and Michael Dash1989, xli). I detail how movement with the geographical zone becomes a critical notion that directs and compels sociopolitical-ecological action.

III. Movement: Relation, Imaginary, and Chaos

In another essay, I detail the importance of oscillation (Zakin Reference Zakin2011),Footnote ¹² rhythm, material circulation (Stone Reference Stone2006),Footnote ¹³ locomotion, and incalculable direction in Irigaray's work (Kim Reference Kim, Kim, Russell and Sharp2022).Footnote ¹⁴ This movement, I suggest, permits Irigaray to denote difference/sameness moments as real but uncontainable within stable categories like “woman,” given the voluminous force of flow/flux of sexuate difference. I note here how Irigaray's notions of movement have relevant synergy with Glissant's articulation of Relation. I include how his notions of retour/detour differ from other Afro-Caribbean thinkers and include how his nomadic detour advances an Irigarayan politics of difference.

Critical to Glissant's deployment of the Deleuzian-Guattarian rhizome-relation trope is the notion of relay, or that which triggers rhizomatic movement. The relay oscillates between the particular and the universal, but its movement is not vertical; it is horizontal toward the O/other. To ensure the common good, distance between relations must be determined, and new zones of relation will be possible. Generalizations no longer hold as universally true, and yet, ethics persist. On what ground will ethics be forged? For Glissant, Relation will guide. He posits that Relation has a movement relative to other movements—“it is neither a restrictive dogmatism nor the skepticism of probabilist thought” (Glissant Reference Glissant and Wing1997, 134). Or, as he puts it, the totality of Relativity is not totalitarian, the mind engages relatively but is not bound by that relation. Situating Relation thus, he turns to an indeterminate telos of relativity bound to chaos. With chaos as its movement flow, relativity shifts from what a thing is, shifting away from a filial, linear orientation or mode of knowing, an obsession with the past, genealogies of knowing, and the origin of the universe, God, and humanity. Instead, he postulates chaos-monde, a cultivation of curiosity about what we cannot contain or measure, the ungraspable, the circularity of the nomad as a kind of knowing. He offers trembling awe that shakes as the world vibrates, shifts, and quakes. He captures well the project of turbulence:

Glissant notes how force moves in the world; sedimentation is merely a preparation for agitated eruption. Moving one piece in a linear logic that it will cause another action to be yielded is itself incomplete, as discernment of linear connections or calculation, in a Humean sense, slips away in the disorder that is already yielding new orders. In a clear nod to Daoist echoes, to erect is to begin to sink into the earth. He notes that the speed of chaos is increasing, and in its wake the chasm between poverty and privilege expands—thus, the need for Relation. Glissant explains relation as “the moment we realize there is a definite quantity of differences in the world. . . . we shouldn't forget a single one of them, even the smallest” (Diawara Reference Diawara2011, 10). Relation functions as a strategy that sets to receive the totality of diversity in the world. In so doing, one calls into question the notion of universality and generalization as insufficient to portray the totality of the universe. Relation hedges the sublation of differences. I suggest that Relation makes it possible for people to receive differences from others, without assimilation or full comprehension of all that is between. The darkness in one's self, and the murkiness between, he calls opacity, which functions to bring into focus the totality of the world, while leaving it beyond the scope of full comprehension. It is a paradoxical knowing/not-knowing that I detail later. With relation guiding, Glissant suggests how to move beyond alienation and exile without returning homeward or essentializing the human agent. He proffers detours in our thinking and political action.

IV. Opaque Self-Affection and Ethics

Transparency, Glissant notes, is a way to create legitimacy and maintain the state-power apparatus. The counterweight to transparency that Glissant explores in his literature is the trope of the maroon, such as the character Longué and the play and irony of Liberté in his fictional piece The Fourth Century (Glissant Reference Glissant and Wing2001). Roberts astutely notes that through the story of Longué's genealogical marronage, the reader explores the zones of being and nonbeing that indicate why and how the conditions of opacity become a guarded refuge (Roberts Reference Roberts2015, 147–52). In The Art of Not Being Governed, James Scott details “shatter zones” of refuge, outside of state appropriation (Scott Reference Scott2009). The state zones are coded as civilized: legitimate dwellings such as the plantation, the valley, and the institutions of statecraft. The state then renders legitimate labor as the system of enslavement and its intricate hierarchies of enslaved people and freed that serve the plantation and the security of the state and its power to appropriate. This state-system stands in contrast to the zones of nonbeing that the state depicts as barbaric, signaled by its illegitimate habitations: the mountains, marshes, mangrove swamps, and hills. The state codes illegitimate labor as that which secures life outside of enslavement, thus requiring these refuges to remain distant from statehood. Under the conditions of statehood, all is made transparent, living in approved dwellings where the population can be surveilled as remaining within the neo-plantation.

However, Glissant questions this all-insistent demand for clear transparency as legitimacy and moral surety meant to justify a defensive and empty humanism. He writes that Western humanity once studied the water to see a transparent reflection of its image; now they find an uneasy opacity. He declares, “There is opacity at the bottom of the mirror, a whole alluvium deposited by populations, silt that is fertile but, in actual fact, indistinct and unexplored even today, denied or insulted more often than not, and with an insistent presence that we are incapable of not experiencing” (Glissant Reference Glissant and Wing1997, 111). Opacity, a thick experience of the world, refuses to mirror the Western subject; the glass is fuliginous. Like an endangered species, “Opacity must be preserved,” he urges (120).

Glissant's words bear witness to a residual, latent fecundity in the water, an unrealized human dignity in the runoff of eroded rocks and soil, which drains into the lowest-lying water. The murkiest water is often, geographically, at the lowest point below the surface—the bottoms, the swamp, the delta, the ocean floor. Correspondingly, this altitude is also where many people and species, crowded out by borders of nation-state formation, private property, or fleeing from the label “property,” gather and have gathered to find a habitat that could shield and envelope them. I hear the political promise to “drain the swamp” that some US political figures currently herald as another way to terminate through eviction by any means necessary people and species the nation-state failed to extinguish. I suggest opaqueness, functions like Irigaray's notion of an envelope or interval, a threshold and hidden passage necessary to temper desire with relation. However, it is also more than Irigaray's conception of the interval—an envelope made necessary because of the white desire for supremacy. Wetlands, lowlands, and other places of opaque water harbor fecund silt and valuable biodiversity. And they may also harbor disease, refuse, and fugitives trying to escape the law-and-order system of monolingual legitimacy—they are ordered and chaotic spaces.

Opacity seems profoundly connected to Glissant's consideration of world-chaos, one of the world iterations he describes in his oeuvre. In “The Black Beach,” he describes a favorite shoreline, jagged black volcanic rock and an underground volcanic intercourse of fire, uprooted trees, and surging waters that seasonally destroys. However, at another time of year, the same space will become white sand and slackened sea. The sea will cyclically render order and chaos (Glissant Reference Glissant and Wing1997, 122). Glissant notes that difference thinkers have opened up the opaque and chaotic as a fertile space for racial and political justice. However, even difference and its constitutive aims can reduce, and he warns, “In order to understand and accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me the grounds to make comparison and, perhaps, judgement. I have to reduce” (190).

Whereas Glissant's earlier meditation on transparency and opacity centered on a critique of language, he shifts to the physical properties of things. Transparency, in this sense, is a reductive gesture meant to locate, calculate, and solidify our sociopolitical aims, particularly for groups Glissant recognizes as minorities. It is a teleological reduction that also removes the social-political horizon of opacity as a liberating movement that expands and flows with the people. Glissant argues for opacity and urges:

I want to hang onto his attention to a textured weave, which I suggest is a way to formulate intersectionality. Threads, when woven, are stronger than their parts, and if we use striated, variegated, and smooth fabrics, still making space for holes, we create a texture that can amplify the strength of a single strand. Glissant gives a beautiful analogy for the skill required to weave differences together.Footnote ¹⁵ Opacity is stronger when the textures are distinct but capably woven together. Glissant theorizes a Relation wherein opacities converge, coexist, and weave. This Relation is beyond facile bumper stickers or signs that extol “All are Welcome.” From silt to fabric weave, Glissant uses strands and sediment to consider the texture, rather than the nature or essence, of minoritized groups. In this way, differences are “felt” rather than essentialized. To feel is to have proximity with what is being handledand to agree to such a touching. Acknowledging and navigating the distance between forms is a necessary ethical condition that must be realized before bringing strands together. By refusing the ocular as a point of knowledge, the darkness forces other senses to be engaged, which requires distance and proximity to be negotiated. Opacity is a way to protect the valuable knowledge, strategies, resistances, and subjective realms of those asked to smooth themselves into the placid reflection of colonial power.

V. Creolization and Sexual Difference

From a colonial perspective, the water surrounding these islands functions as a medium or way to access the lands and the people connected to them. The conquerors consider all these elsewhere lands to be resources available to advance the capitalist wealth of other nations. The project of sexual difference uncovers the sexual language of this plantation economy built on the sands and volcanic rock of the Antilles—we failed to consider the sea. In her work, Irigaray notes that both the sea (la mer) and the mother (la mère) function as places for the solid identity of a male subject, master of language, to appear and be surrounded, floated, and sustained. In Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray suggests that woman becomes the place for place, like an invisible gravitational matrix (Murtagh Reference Murtagh2019)Footnote ¹⁶ surrounding, nourishing, and supporting the substance of the universe.

Key to the plantation as a place of domination is its monoculture of sexuate indifference of the One, and the sexed production of the One is constitutive to his power. To reveal the Oneness of the plantation, the critique of sexuate difference insists that we must uncover its sexuate condition(s) of being and becoming and its subsequent sublimation of all others. Sublimation, a concept typically associated with psychoanalytic theory, means to “divert or modify an instinctual into a culturally higher or socially more acceptable activity” (Lexico n.d.). An example might be to sublimate one's libido into productive activities, such as cooking, art, or writing. The noun form is also of interest in Irigarayan work, as the term also relates to the notion of the sublime and indicates, from the vantage of chemistry, the point at which, when heated, something shifts from a solid to a gas and when cooled the reverse. To sublimate is to initiate a process yielding a purity of something morally or spiritually. In the realm of the One, Irigaray argues, the flesh/instincts/drive is what must be sublimated, vaporized, and overcome so the morally and spiritually pure, solid, One is culturally elevated. However, reading Freud, Irigaray notes, “It is assumed that woman, apart from a few exceptional individuals, has less aptitude than man for sublimation. That assumption is built into the very operation of sublimation, into its purpose, its conditions, its methods. . . . ‘femininity,’ even successfully achieved, cannot sublimate” (Irigaray Reference Irigaray and Gill1985a, 123). To elevate oneself in the neo-plantation of the Americas, one must become a person capable of sublimation; one must become a “he.” Glissant acknowledges this blind assumption of “he-ness” when he writes, “blindness and compensatory paternalism—in short, the very elements present in any place, Caribbean or continental, that is part of the Plantation universe, possessing subject matter that lends itself to specificity as well as sublimation” (Glissant Reference Glissant1999, 96; italics mine). Composite people, he suggests, are also incapable of sublimating or masking their hybrid composition; they cannot yield a pure mythical pedigree of origin (Glissant Reference Glissant and Michael Dash1989, 139). Glissant assesses the poet Saint-John Perse ambivalently as a béké Footnote ¹⁷ who skillfully portrays the dense fecundity of all the island engenders, and yet agrees to sublimate Caribbean histories and natural singularities to the single History of the Logos because he is the inevitable exported product of the plantation-island (227–28). But with pointed political critique, Glissant argues that generalizing universality operates via the sublimation of “individual dignity based on the reality of private property. It is also the ultimate weapon in the process of depersonalizing a vulnerable people” (139). If Irigaray points us to the “she” incapable of sublimation, Glissant notes the Creole as her illegitimate offspring also without origin, incapable of sublimating instinct/drive/flesh. She is not in the abyss alone. But by pointing to the she in the abyss, it does not follow that sexuate difference theory must reify this male/female binary; rather, it points to its power to obscure those backgrounded by the Oneness of the foreground. For the sea is the womb-tomb that holds the bodies of the enslaved thrown overboard, a sunken memorial that continues to cry out against the sublimating project (not location) that is the West. However, Valérie Loichot notes that Glissant shifts from memorializing the many by saying the name of only his mother—“Adrienne Marie Euphémie” (Loichot Reference Loichot2013, 1028).

Max Hantel evocatively traces Glissant's language of the slave boat as “a womb abyss” (Hantel Reference Hantel2014). He observes the necessary relationship between the slave economy and the reproductive control of the female body, literally the womb, as another way slavery unequally values certain bodies. Irigaray notes the corporeal naturalization of women's labor as reproductive in “Women on the Market” when she writes, “A sociocultural endogamy would thus forbid commerce with women. Men make commerce of them, but they do not enter into any exchanges with them” (Irigaray Reference Irigaray, Porter and Burke1985b, 172). Irigaray fails to analyze how racism legitimizes white supremacy, which renders Black lives a commodity in a white, capitalist, global economy. Still, her analysis helps specify the ontology of the Same at work in the market. According to Irigaray, markets value things according to their ability to move goods and resources for the Self-Same. With an intersectional point, Hantel returns to Irigaray's infamously read statement: “the problem of race is, in fact, a secondary problem—except from a geographical point of view.” Often read as a hierarchical statement that race scores lower than sex, Hantel reframes the statement:

Indeed, it is the replication of another violent order that I read Glissant so apt to undo in re-geo-graphing the French language, his oscillating movement between root and rhizome, his collapse of errantry and exile, and his opaque chaos. Glissant's movement reframes Irigaray's evolutionary momentum of sexual difference, enabling the fragmented, paradoxical knowing of creolized people to fissure continental thought and protect the opaque spaces critical for sexuate subjects to return to themselves. His work is racialized as it theorizes relation beyond not-being. And it is ethical in that it asks people to relate to the Thought of the Other and to move toward the Other of Thought, which is to act. He writes, “That is the moment I change my thought, without renouncing its contribution. I change, and I exchange. This is an aesthetics of turbulence whose corresponding ethics is not provided in advance” (Glissant Reference Glissant and Wing1997, 154–55). In sum, I read in these words Glissant's permission for us to live our ethics in murky, chaotic, oscillating, and yet critically engaged thought-action with the other. This interval strengthens the weave of difference.