‘A definite quantity of all the differences in the world’: Glissant, Spinoza, and the Abyss as True Cause

Abstract

In a conversation with Manthia Diawara aboard the Queen Mary II in 2009, Édouard Glissant elaborated his definition of Relation, a concept that he formally presented in his book Poétique de la relation in 1990, but that emerged out of years of writing about creolization and cultural action in the Caribbean. Sitting at the ship’s window, with the Atlantic Ocean crashing around him, Glissant explains that “the truth that is increasingly coming to light about Black reality in the New World is the truth of multiplicity, the truth of the step towards the Other.”