From chaos-monde to the Tout-monde

Abstract

This article offers an interpretation of Édouard Glissant’s conception of the world as, in certain instances, the product of an innovative poetics containing a latent ecological ontology. Locating the advent of his eventual ecological turn in the early works, Soleil de la conscience (1956) and Le Sel noir (1961), this turn is initiated in occupations of placement and displacement as a basis for asserting the multiplicity of human singularity challenging assumed interconnection. These questions are subsequently developed in Glissant’s archipelagic thought on the conscious levels of perception, cognition, and expression. Glissant’s master concept of Relation and his world formation, chaos-monde, then provide a bridge to formulating a stochastic aesthetics representing terrestrial disorder and contingency - including their own autotelic expression in his last poetry collection, Les Grands chaos (1993). Accordingly, this reading then turns on Glissant’s ontological distinctions in the essay, ‘Images de l’Être, Lieux de l’Imaginaire’ (2006). I argue that by coming to ambiguously ascribe the completed totality of differences as an ontological rather than poetic prospect of Relation, Glissant’s prior ecological ontology has its identity threatened with dissolution. I conclude that at best this offers an unpredictable and mutable identity, but at worst, is destined for a substitute universalism - the problematically structured Tout-monde.