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Rhizomatic Influence: The Antigenealogy of Glissant and Deleuze

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2019

Neal A. Allar
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Abstract

To identify literary influences is, conventionally, to build a genealogy—to, in Salman Rushdie’s words, “name one’s parents.” But can this family-tree view of literary influence hold up in postcolonial literature—a body of work that has so thoroughly deconstructed concepts of genealogy? This article turns to a pivotal case of “influence” in postcolonial Francophone literature and philosophy: among Édouard Glissant and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The latter two writers are thought to have influenced Glissant’s thinking with their concept of the “rhizome,” but the rhizome directly counters such genealogizing as this “influence” would imply. In fact, this article shows, Glissant develops his own version of the rhizome from his very earliest writings, particularly his first poems. An analysis of them alongside Glissant’s subsequent essays and Deleuze and Guattari’s own writing, allows for a more complicated, multidirectional—that is, rhizomatic—theory of postcolonial influence.

Keywords

rhizomeRelationinfluencepoetrygenealogypostcolonialismAntilleanness
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 1 - 13
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

I thank the Tsinghua-Michigan Society of Fellows for supporting the research that led to this article. I am also grateful to Réda Bensmaïa and Thangam Ravindranathan, with whom I had the pleasure of sharing a first version of this piece during an MLA panel. Finally, thank you to Laurent Dubreuil, Natalie Melas, and Antoine Traisnel for their reading and inspiration of this work.

References

1 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, vol. 2 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 21 Google Scholar .

2 Quoted in Mukherjee, Ankhi, What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 7 Google Scholar .

3 Mukherjee, What Is a Classic?, 7. Mukherjee’s book includes a sustained reflection on the different valences of influence in Anglophone literature today, especially regarding how Derek Walcott, in his poetry and essays, creolizes the modernist practice of allusion. Mukherjee leafs through the layers of Walcott’s references to past works to show how he “chooses … to prolong ‘the mighty line of Marlowe and Milton.’ ” In such a practice of allusion, we find the English literary tradition “decaying in the Caribbean climate like other relics of a brutal plantocracy” (108). In this frame, though, Walcott’s creolization of modernist allusion must maintain a temporal structure in which the past texts exist as completed objects, subject more to decay rather than renewal, and later poets treat them as part of a historical or literary landscape that haunts the mind. My argument is less concerned with an author’s choice of parentage and more focused on the multidirectional interaction of texts across time as they encounter one another through reading and criticism.

4 Glissant, Édouard, Le discours antillais (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1997), 333–336 Google Scholar .

5 See, for example, Britton, Celia, Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 6 Google Scholar .

6 Alexandre Leupin is the only scholar, to my knowledge, to have explicitly suggested reversing the debt of influence between these thinkers, against the grain of time: “The question (and I would leave it to others to map this out) would not be one of Deleuze’s influence on Glissant but, inversely, how much Deleuze (and Guattari) owe to Glissant (much, I think)” (Édouard Glissant, philosophe. Héraclite et Hegel dans le tout-monde [Paris: Hermann Éditeurs, 2016], 239).

7 Glissant, Édouard, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 11 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

8 Glissant does marginally mention the Deleuzian-Guattarian “rhizome” in a note to the 1981 text Le discours antillais (Paris: Gallimard, Folio essais, 1997), 338–40, and he is much more skeptical of the term at this point. Somewhat controversially, this note is among the sections not included in the English translation, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville, VA, The University Press of Virginia, 1989). On opacity, see Allar, Neal, “The Case for Incomprehension: Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation and the Right to Opacity,” The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 23.1 (2015): 43–58 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

9 Hallward, Peter, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2001), 67 Google Scholar .

10 Ibid., 66.

11 Badiou, Alain, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)Google Scholar .

12 Nesbitt, Nick, “Deleuze, Hallward and the Transcendental Analytic of Relation,” Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures, eds. Lorna Burns and Birgit M. Kaiser (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 96, 97 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

13 Ibid., 98–99.

14 Bensmaïa, Réda, Gilles Deleuze, Postcolonial Theory, and the Philosophy of Limit (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 1–22 Google Scholar .

15 For Deleuze, singularities are the organizing elements of the “event,” as they swarm together in different configurations and create thoughts, actions, and effects. He explains that a singularity is “essentially pre-individual, non-personal, and a-conceptual. It is quite indifferent to the individual and the collective, the personal and the impersonal, the particular and the general.” (Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundras, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale [New York: Columbia University Press, 1990], 52).

16 Quoted in Loichot, Valérie, “Édouard Glissant’s Graves,” Callaloo 36.4 (2013): 1025 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

17 Glissant, L’imaginaire des langues: entretiens avec Lise Gauvin (Paris: Gallimard, 2010) 33.

18 For Glissant’s notion of the détour in opposition to the retour, see Le Discours antillais, 47–48.

19 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21.

20 For a successful example, see Azérad, Hughes, “Poétique/politique de la césure dans la poésie d’Édouard Glissant,” L’Esprit créateur 55.1 (2015): 152–166 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

21 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 190.

22 Glissant, Édouard, La terre, le feu, l’eau et les vents: une anthologie de la poéise du tout-monde (Paris: Galaade Éditions, 2010), 15 Google Scholar .

23 Glissant, Édouard, Poèmes complets (Paris: Gallimard, 1994)Google Scholar .

In this article, I provide modified versions of The Collected Poems of Édouard Glissant, ed. Jeff Humphres, trans. Jeff Humphries and Melissa Manolas (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

24 Glissant, Poèmes complets, 10.

25 Glissant, The Collected Poems, 5.

26 Deleuze, Gilles, “He Stuttered,” Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, eds. Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowksi (New York: Routledge, 1994), 23 Google Scholar .

27 Ibid., 25.

28 Ibid., 27.

29 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 160.

30 Glissant, Édouard, L’intention poétique (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 135 Google Scholar .

31 Drabinski, John E., “Césaire’s Apocalyptic Word,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 115.3 (July 2016): 567 Google Scholar .

32 Drabinski, John E., Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 146–147 Google Scholar .

33 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 8.

34 Significantly, though, the argument for a Deleuzian-Guattarian “influence” on Glissant often rests on flimsy scholarship. At the beginning of a chapter on the encounter between Deleuze/Guattari and Glissant that “profoundly influenced” the latter, Nick Nesbitt takes a quotation from François Dosse’s Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari. Biographie croisée (Paris: La Découverte, 2007), 515, that cites a radio interview in which Glissant compares meeting Guattari, in the early 1980s, to hearing Socrates for the first time. But the interview that Dosse cites, “Philosophie de la mondialité,” July 25, 2003, France Inter, mentions neither Deleuze nor Guattari. My thanks to François Noudelmann, the host of the interview series of which this one was a part, for providing the recording to me.

35 Glissant, Poèmes complets, 13, and The Collected Poems, 6 (translation modified).

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid.

38 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 6, 24.

39 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 11.

40 Glissant, Le discours antillais, 339, my translation.

41 To follow the taxonomy: the Discoverers, the Nomadic wanderers, and the “interior exiles.”

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid., p. 340, my translation.

44 It is indeed true that Deleuze and Guattari avoid any concept of “the Other.” It appears not once in the chapter on the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus and only as a term attributed to others in the rest of the work.

45 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 11.

46 Badiou, Alain, Deleuze. “La clameur de l’Être” (Paris: Fayard/Pluriel, 2010)Google Scholar , 22, my translation.

47 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 25.

48 Glissant, Édouard, L’intention poétique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969), 35–36 Google Scholar , my translation, my italics.

49 Glissant, La terre, le feu, l’eau et les vents, 15. The English translation is mine.

50 See Allar, Neal, “‘Le Bateau ivre’ en archipel,” Parade Sauvage 28 (2017): 131–149 Google Scholar .