Glissant - Poetics of Relation

Errant - def. adj. Roving, especially in search of adventure: knights errant.
Straying from the proper course or standards: errant youngsters.
Wandering outside the established limits: errant lambs.
Aimless or irregular in motion: an errant afternoon breeze.

Errantry - def. The condition of traveling or roving about, especially in search of adventure.


I began wondering if we did not still need such founding works today, ones that would use a similar dialectics of rerouting, asserting, for example, political strength but, simultaneously, the rhizome of a multiple relationship with the Other and basing every community's reasons for existence on a modern form of the sacred, which would be, all in all, a Poetics of Relation.

Implicit - ”My root is strongest.“
Explicit - ”A person's worth is determined by his root.“

Whereas the Western nation is first of all an "opposite", or colonized peoples' identity will be primarily "opposed to" – that is, a limitation from the beginning. Decolonization will have done its real work when it goes beyond this limit.

This errant thought, silently emerges from the destructuring of compact national entities that yesterday were still triumphant and, at the same time, from difficult, uncertain births of new forms of identity that call to us.

Sometimes, by taking up the problems of the Other, it is possible to find oneself.

That is very much the image of the rhizome, prompting the knowledge that identity is no longer completely within the root but also in Relation.

Relation, in contrast, is spoken multilingually. Going beyond the impositions of economic forces and cultural pressures, Relation rightfully opposes the totalitarianism of monolingual intent.

While one can communicate through errantry's imaginary vision, the experiences of exiles are incommunicable.

The will to identity is nothing other than the search for a freedom within particular surroundings.

One who is errant strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he will never accomplish this - and knows that is precisely where the threatened beauty of the world resides.

In reality, errant thinking is the postulation of an unyielding and unfading sacred.