On Beauty as Complicity

Abstract

This interview concerns Une nouvelle région du monde. Beauty is not essentialist or transcendent but stems from the meeting of differences. The new region is a version of the Whole-World; and beauty comes about through the differences in the world. The book has in common with the Traité du Tout-monde that it concerns a vision of the Whole-World, but differs in that it is centrally about beauty.This realized quantity of differences is not the same as a universal. In all cultures there is a nostalgia for the primordial moment when there was a sense of complicity and fusion with the world around us, as opposed to utilitarian art, which asserts the singularity of a given culture. Primitive or indigenous art retains the sense of fusion with the world. Francophony is a result of the colonial enterprise.