ALA 2015

Glissants schloarship is often presented as a major shift in the evolution of Afrocaribbean discourses on identity from the essentialist theory of a return to the source
developed by Negritude scholars to a reflection on diversality. A careful analysis of
Senghors and Glissants similar political projects, namely their critiques of the modern
universalist subject, shows however, that despite the traditional understanding of African
and Caribbean thought as the evolution from an essentialist theory of roots to a more
sophisticated theory of diversality, their intellectual projects are particularly different.
One is an ontology and an epistemology of simplicity that asks the question of the
ultimate nature of being and the modes of apprehending truth; the other is a theory
of chaos interested in the conditions of creation of meaning rather than the ultimate
nature of things. The difference between Glissants and Senghors philosophies is
illustrated, I claim, in their theories of orality and writing.
Senghors philosophy of simplicity, illustrated by his theory of orality
and writing, is fundamentally an attempt to define the ultimate nature
of things, an ontology, and a reflection on the modes of defining and
reaching the immediate data of consciousness. No needs to say, thus,
that as most ontologies, it leads to an epistemology. Before we delve
deep into Senghors ontology through his theory of orality, let us, first,
join Souleymane Bachir Diagne, as he invites us to follow Pablo
Picassos first visit at the muse du Trocadero, a year after he finished
his Portrait de Gertrude Stein. This digression will, in turn, allow us to
better understand Senghors ontology, which, I claim, constitutes the
basis of his theory of orality.
Its 1907, Picasso had completed, a year earlier, the portrait of
Gertrude Stein. This portrait determines an important moment in his
oeuvre as it marks the end of his rose period and foreshadows his
adoption of cubism. Picasso does not paint clearly defined portraits
anymore. Rather, he substitutes them with mask-like figures as if he
wants to exorcise the demon that stops him from seeing the very
nature of things buried under simple decipherable traits. But why does
he paint like this? He does not know yet. Yet, he, nonetheless, has the
intuition that these masks say more than they hide. When, however,
he arrives at the muse de Trocadro, in June 1907, the veil that had
been blurring his intuition was miraculously lifted. Bachir Diagne
reminds us Picassos own memories of this moment thirty seven years
later, as he was finishing Guernica:
When I set foot in Trocadro, Picasso tells his friend Andr
Malraux, it was disgusting. The flee market. The smell. I was all
by myself. I wanted to leave. Yet, I was not budging. I stayed.
And stayed. I understood that what was happening to me \ was
very important. The masks, they were not like other sculptures.
Not at all. They were magical. [] We did not notice. Primitives,

but not magical. Negroes, they were intercessors, it is then that I

learned the word in French. [] I understood what their
sculptures were for. Why sculpt this way and not otherwise. 1
Why sculpt this way and not otherwise? Senghors answer to this
question proposes a less simplistic response. Negroes paint like this
and not otherwise, the theoretician of Negritude contends, because
their particular relations to the world leads to a completely different
understanding of being as force. To understand this being, for
Senghor, it is logical that Negroes create a mode of relation to the
object of knowledge that sets the conditions to be one with it. This
mode of sculpting is therefore, for the Senegalese scholar,
representative of a Negro epistemology rooted in an ontology of force.
It is founded on a conscious attempt to reach the immediate data of
consciousness. As Senghors answer suggests, African art is less the
mark of a primitive culture indicating the childhood of humanity than it
is illustrative of a certain degree of maturity. (that is precisely why
Diagne argues that) The aesthetics of the African mask denotes, for
Senghor, the rhythm of life that constitutes the vitalist essence of
things.
If I have spent such a long time explaining the importance of African
painting as essential to Senghors philosophy, it is because the
definition of this je ne sais quoi constitutive of African art that Picasso
presents naively and paternalistically as the mark of primitive art is
precisely what Senghor has attempted to present in his entire
philosophy. It is, as Diagne argues, the very manifestation of African
philosophy. 43-44 In other words, Negritude is, through a rhythmic
attitude, constitutive of African art as ontology, a philosophy of being.
I argue that one can make the same claim in regards to orality in
Senghors philosophy because, the essence of orality is the same as
that of African art, that is, rhythm as the ultimate means to reach the
very nature of things. Art, in Senghors philosophy, is poetry and the
essence of poetry, he believes, is the vibrating rhythm of the oral word.
As his comparison of African and European poetry implies, Senghor
understands orality as the first manifestation of African ontology. He
declares:
The first similarity that I found between Claudels language
(parole) and that of negro-Africans is that they both are rooted in
a total vision of the world, in a Weltanschauung, that is,
essentially, an ontology that they express. An ontology, that is, a
science of being and a coherent sum of principles and ideas that
1 Picasso, Oeuvres completes III, pp 696-697 Diagne, 42

explain, beyond the nature of things, the sturcture of the world

and the relations between beings, and even the elements,. 350
Orality is, in effect, for the Sereer scholar, the foundation of being.
This comparison between Claudel, the Christian poet, and Negro
African scholarship, reminds us that Senghors respect for Christianity
is rooted in what he considers the latters treatment of the verb as
constitutive of the essence of the world. As Raymond Ndiaye reminds
us, it is the bishop of Hippone (Saint Augustin), that gave him
back his soul, his spirituality, by taking him back to his kamito-semitic
roots, through the concepts of charity and the creative Word, which
both are fundamenrtally african. As And Senghor recalls, as if to
illustrate Raymon Ndiayes point:
It is Amma, the uncreated and all-powerful god that created all
beings and things. Prior to that moment, these latter were bare
ideograms, located in the egg of the world. It is from this egg,
fecundated by Ammas word that the first two humans came.
The creation of the world is completed, he adds, by Nommo, who
descended from the sky on an arch that contained not only the
eight first human ancestors, but also all the animals, plants,
minerals and elements that inhabit the universe It is to
Nommo, that god will give the mastery of the word and the
mission to teach it to the be-ings by un-muting them
At the beginning, Senghor tells us, there is the oral word, la parole
parle, that had the vital element necessary for the fecundation of
man. Orality is thus, for the Senegalese scholar la nature profonde
the ultimate nature and the essential manifestation of things as it
insufflates being with life. La parole parle, he thinks, is not only
that which completes the world, it is also constitutive of its
quintessence. If being, Senghor tells us, as he recalls Placide Tempels,
is force, then the oral nature of the verb is that which en-forces the
world and en-livens the person.
These qualities of orality Senghor believes enable us to escape the
epistemic limits of writing. He proceeds, in the same text, to oppose
orality, the spoken work, to writing, le graphic sign, because the
latter, Negroes say, breaks the rhythm, the essence of the Verb deforces speech by making it inert. 371 It is important to note that
Senghor is a poet and a linguist. The choice of the words and the
structure of his sentences matter particularly. The use of the verb,
breaks and the neologism de-forces determine the limits of writing
as a means to understand the very nature of the world. To break the

essence of the verb (for the poet who reminds us, through Claudel,
that the very foundation of the Negro ontology is ne impedias
musicam, that is, not to break the harmony of the world) is to miss
the possibility of understanding its particular manifestation. It is
therefore to dforcer, the world, that is, to de-livens it.
Writing functions, thus, in Senghors philosophy as that which
separates the object and the subject of knowledge and consequently
subtracts its constitutive force, that is, the vital element constitutive
of our vibratory world and words. It has, for Senghor, a relation of
exteriority with the signified. It is a process of thought that produces
meaning through the representation of the object of knowledge. To
write is to translate and to miss the very nature of things precisely
because while writing fixes things in space and time, the very nature of
things is to become in a constantly changing lan. Writing is, for the
Senegalese scholar, at best, a descriptive element condemned to miss
the vibratory materialization of being, the rhythmic essence of things,
that Picasso discovered in the African mask.
It is therefore clear that the hermeneutics of Senghors relation to
orality shows that his philosophy is fundamentally an ontology.
In the same vein as Leopold Sedar Senghors, Edouard Glissants
philosophy starts from the postulation that the modern universalist
paradigm is rooted in a Eurocentric historicity that leads to a
hierarchical understanding of world cultures in general and the
disenfranchisement of people of African descent in particular. Despite
the similarities between the two authors analyses of the centralization
of the European subject illustrated by their critiques of writing,
however, the same assessments that lead Senghor to consider
that the modern European teleology and its ensuing ontology
and epistemology determines Africans subhumanities and
should therefore be replaced by a better ontology and
epistemology, has a different effect on Glissants oeuvre. The
Martinican scholar considers rather, that the modern
Eurocentric understanding of humanness is an effect rather
that a cause of a more important issue: the very conditions of
possibility of the modes of definitions of the world that allowed
the Eurocentric modern paradigm to thrive. Accordingly, rather
than the question of the ultimate nature of being, the resolution of
which, Senghor believes, can lead to a better understanding of the
diversity constitutive of our world, Glissant is interested in the
practices, the narratives, and the discourses that have made possible
the invention of History and its corollary the hierarchical representation
of world cultures. Thus, rather than propose, as in the case of
Senghor, a better ontology as a means to rethink black cultures

humanness, Glissant attempts, as he says in the first pages of the

Caribbean Discourse, to trace the processes, the vectors, that had
woven the web of nothingness in which some people are glued today.
P.14 In other words, Glissants interest in the conditions that led to the
seemingly uni-versal world in which we live led him to ask a question
that is more of interest to me here: What are the discourses,
narratives, and practices that led to the uni-versal and generalizing
humanist paradigm? What are the cognitive tools that have allowed
the invention of a world founded on the universalization of the
provincial European subject?
As in the case of Senghor, a hermeneutics of Glissants critique of
History and his theory of opacity through a particular analysis of his
understanding of the dialectics of writing and orality shows that, for
him, the generalizing understanding of the world constitutive of
modern humanism is rooted in a particular poetics of writing. It is, he
claims, the very aesthetic and political nature of writing that enables
the invention of the European enlightenments universalist subject.
In fact, while Senghors philosophy is fundamentally a theory of
intelligibility based on the possibility to understand the ultimate data of
consciousness, Glissants work functions as a critique of intelligibility
through a theory of opacity. This is precisely why, while Senghor
attempts to find the possibility to reach the ultimate nature of being,
Glissant is interested in an utterly different question. The difference
between Senghors theory of intelligibility and Glissants philosophy of
opacity is most visible in the latters understanding of the limits of
writing. Writing is essentially, for Glissant, the promise of
transparency. It is, he says, linked to a transcendental philosophy of
being that, today, should be invested and relayed by a problematic of
relation 410. Writing is, in other words, the language of Being in a
becoming world. It is that which fixes, on a particular space, the
evanescent reality of things. Writing, he says, supposes the absence
of movement. 404 Writing functions, thus, as the materialization of
what Bergson calls the snapshots constitutive of intellectual relations
to the world in what Glissant considers an ultimately opaque world
characterized by the un-penetrable difference constitutive of the very
nature of things.
Orality, on the other hand, has, for Glissant, the ability to continue the
necessary relation with the other, while keeping its essential otherness.
As opposed to writing, orality is intrinsically the promise of chaos in a
global world. It sets the conditions for an aesthetics of diversity that
does not search for the possibility of universal understanding. It
proposes rather an evanescent aesthetics of change, as its truth is
bound to be relayed and related Orality consecrates, thus, the

possibility of a discussion and yet acknowledges the opacity

constitutive of our existences. While despite its revolutionary
potential, the postcolonial tradition (who?) falls too often in the
impossible situation of theorizing the impossibility of truth in a
discourse centered in the Western intellectual tradition, the condition
of peripherality characteristic of a language rooted in orality offers the
possibility of a non-generalizing condition of existence in its
particularly vanishing nature. That is precisely why Celia Britton says
that Glissants opaque subject is different and more positive than Homi
Bhabhas pessimistic subaltern. In fact for Bhabha the subalterns
position makes him unable to master the discourse of the elite and is
therefore condemned to subalternity. Glissant is more radical than
Bhabha as he questions the seeming necessity of intelligibility
in a world based on an ethics of equality. His theory of orality,
based on the ultimate acknowledgement of the others
irreducible otherness, guarantees the collapses of all centers and
foregrounds the destruction of the very possibility of subalterneity. It
offers therefore the means to go beyond the aporetic condition of the
postcolonial subject that is, the impossibility to speak the codified
language of the other without repeating its domination and the
impossible to speak any other language(p.30 Brit, 237 DA)
The comparative analysis of Senghors and Glissants works shows that
both authors have, to a great extent, a similar political project. They,
along with most anti-colonial and postcolonial schoalrs, attempt to
debunk modern humanist universalist understanding of the world .
They both attempt to uncover the darker side of modernity and offer
possibilities to think of otherness and other modes of relations to the
world and of being human. Yet, their epistemic projects cannot simply
be presented as different moments of the development of Africana
studies from an essentialism of identity (Senghor) to a more complex
postcolonial philosophy of diversity (Glissant). Rather, despite their
similar political projects, their epistemic projects are fundamentally
different even if they are both rooted in a critique of writing and a
praise of orality. One is an ontological reflection on the limits of the
modern subject based on the promise of intelligibility. It is a theory of
simplicity. The other is an epistemology founded on a critique of
teleology and a praise of opacity, and otherness. It is a theory of
chaos.