Creolizing Levinas: On Fecundity and its Poetics [DRAFT] This determined a writing for the Other, a borrowed writing,

steeped in French values, or at least unrelated to this land, and which, in spite of a few positive aspects, did nothing else but maintain in our minds the domination of an elsewhere loge de la crolit It has become common enough among the more globally minded to critique Emmanuel Levinas work as Eurocentric. And with good reason. For all of his analysis and rhetorical deployment of that great conceptual notion of the Other, Levinas closes the critical horizon of his work within the boundaries of Europe. In terms of literacy, engagement with global events (Levinas lived through waves of anti-colonial struggle in the francophone world), and philosophical curiosity, his work never ventures outside the fantasy cultural object Europe. The centrism, then, is plenty evident, even if never thematized in Levinas own pages. Europe, it is worth saying here and again, is not an actual continent, nor is it a natural boundary. Rather, it is a construction borne of various colonial and xenophobic fantasies. In douard Glissants turn of phrase, Europe is not a place, but a project. Let us begin with the idea of leaving this centrism and thinking otherwise, with Levinas. What would it mean to delink Levinas and Levinasian thinking from its casual obsession with Europe and European historical experience? This question is not polemical and in fact has its own imperative. Levinas Eurocentrism is an important issue in part because it allows our critical reflection on his sometimes disturbing, racist remarks to gain footing beyond the easy (and often righteous) moralism of personal critique. I would hope that all Levinasians are disturbed by his xenophobia and casual racism. Being disturbed is very different than critical intervention or reflection, however. We have to begin considering a difficult story: that Levinas various remarks about China, Palestinians, and the notion that all else is just dance reveal something about the theory of the ethical, and not

just Levinas the person. Perhaps the ethical theory that has occasioned so much pause and genuflection is itself embedded in some rather ugly habits of Western thought. Such critique is well-deserved, overdue, and hardly externally partisan. After all, Levinas theoretical commitment to the first position of the Other ought to provoke reflection on how his work is so vulnerable to racist and xenophobic remarks. If the Other is first, and the Other is made the object of ridicule, objectification, or instrumentalization, then critical questions of a betrayal of thinking, insincerity of thought, or even limits to a theory of the ethical relation arise as internal to the theoretical orientation. These sorts of concerns foreground my reflections here. Instead of undertaking the difficult, elaborate work of un-thinking the Eurocentrism of Levinas work what I call decolonizing Levinasian thinking I would like to propose another form of critical work. My short reflection here begins a projection of creolizing Levinas. By creolizing, I mean here the sense Glissant gives to the term: a way of thinking about mixture and cultural production that privileges the chaotic play of difference over all sense of roots and rooted notions of home. At the same time, Glissants account of creolization appreciates, as a matter of ethical foundation, the opacity of traditions, experiences, concepts, languages, and so on. So, to begin the process of creolizing Levinas is to begin with the simultaneity of authentic difference and the productivity of points of creative contact. Historical experience will form the point of difference below, marking the distinct character of Levinas European imagination of meaning production in relation to the New World epistemology of beginning. Contact centers around that theme which is not only wholly human, but central to narratives of oppression, violence, genocide, and totalizing exclusion: what is the future to us?

By way of this wider theme of creolization, entwined with Levinas around the common thread of futurity, I want to gesture toward what I call a poetics of fecundity. A poetics of fecundity is, to be plain, a formal set of conditions for aesthetic interventions that re-imagine the world as an open future. The future is by definition open, but fecundity brings the importance of reproduction the moment of interval between the present, the past and the future to the fore. This is to my mind Levinas enduring and important contribution to thinking difference and imagination. So, then, the guiding questions: How does the logic of fecundity operate in order to produce the new? In that operation, what does fecundity have to say about creativity as poiesis, a coming into being for the first time, and its relation to historical experience? And, in the end, what does fecundity offer to our sense of the place of imagination in theorizing resistance, the reconceptualization of place, people, and self, and, ultimately the meaning of liberation?

CONTINUOUS FUTURES In a certain sense, theorizing the future is straightforward. The future is obstinate, and, at least in principle, it can always bear great promise. Another world is possible. We often anticipate the future because it promises something different, a revitalization of life, or maybe even liberation from a stifling present. Part of the enduring appeal of hope the hope for hope, one could say is that we want to redeem the present and past in a time to come. In desperate times, too, the obstinate character of the future is hope enough. Some day, this will all be over. Levinas account of the future in Totality and Infinity suspends questions of hope (taken up elsewhere in his work on the messianic) and any radical break with the past and present (which is absent in his work), focusing instead on the interval in which the future becomes my or even our future. Time is not simply an element. Levinas, after all, works in the horizon of

phenomenology and its commitment to subjectivity, no matter the structure of transcendence. In this register, time is lived as a series of intrahuman relations, the most prominent of which is of course the ethical. There is the time of the Other as exceeding me, which becomes, Levinas more mature work, the structure of diachrony. There is also the time of fecunditys Other a time to-come, which is also the identity of the subject in and of the present. Fecundity, which is the interval-structure of futurity, is also a relation with an Other, but in a very different sense. Fecundity is incarnate and transcendent. Yet, as it marks its distinction from the strict sense of the ethical, fecundity is structured as a relation to an Other who is not yet in the phenomenological field. The Other of fecundity is beyond the face. What is futurity? And what is fecundity to the future? Levinas reflections on fecundity at the close of Totality and Infinity are both well-known and utterly mysterious. They are wellknown because they re-incarnate reflections on alterity. Fecundity locates otherness in the body, both in terms of the process of being and becoming Other (reproduction) and the meaning of holding forth into the future (the body of the son). And yet these are very strange reflections throughout. Reproduction is about futurity, and so fecundity redraws the previous triangle of what Levinas calls the posteriority of the anterior. Initially, the posteriority of the anterior moves around the first two points of Same and Other, which is then diverted in terms of the responsible and repositionable passion and energy into the Third, which, further, returns to the Same and Other in a distorted (if this is possible) chiasm of obligation. That triangle operates in standard Levinasian temporality. The excessiveness of the present floods subjectivity with a surplus of responsibilities, moving from the intensity of the face-to-face to the peculiar political stories of fraternity, the we, a community of otherness(es) structured around the plot-arc of the third party. Levinas account of the past in Totality and Infinity, which is still rather muted when

compared to the austere analysis we find in Otherwise than Being, seals responsibility to the Other, the moral consciousness of the Same, and the Third in the phenomenological trope of the always already. That is, our responsibility is not something I forge in the face-to-face and in the weird appeal of the third, but instead something I discover in the very prior animation of my subjectivity. Levinas perfects this language in Otherwise than Being when he articulates subjectivity as psyche. In the later work, subjectivity is creaturely quite literally created by the breath of the Other. Contact with the Other animates the body in the production of for-the-Other subjectivity. Political obligation functions as a companion and largely parallel genesis of the responsible subject. This is the standard story of the Levinasian ethical. Fecundity changes the time-structure of otherness. If fecundity is about the future as such, then the relation of obligation it initiates is both more intimate and more abstract. Rather than triangulating among incarnate and temporal intimates or, simply, those in proximity of body (the Other) and idea (the Third) fecundity puts reproduction and its deferrals at the center of time and responsibility. At the very moment I am fecund, I am placed in a deferred time. Like all deferred times, the signature of my moral consciousness is implicated in time, if not yet fully realized precisely because it lies in a future I do not live. Reproduction sites responsibility in three places: the paternal subject, who becomes responsible for the future in reproducing an Other whose temporality exceeds the finitude of the father, the son, who carries the name of the father (in the non-Lacanian sense), and the future itself as an infinite horizon of simultaneous determinability (a son is conceived) and non-determinability (the surname is no sure identity). In a well-known passage, Levinas writes: The son is not only my work, like a poem or an object, nor is he my property. Neither the categories of power nor those of knowledge describe my relation with the child. The fecundity of the I is neither a cause nor a domination. I do not have my child; I am my

child. Paternity is a relation with a stranger who while being Otheris me, a relation of the I with a self which is not yet me.1 Fecundity lived as paternity has an ontological claim on the subject I am my child while at the same time, in the time of deferral, dismantling any center to the claim to be the child. Levinas account of time here loops. It loops, not because Levinas lacks clarity on the concept, but because the time of the future is simultaneously the time of the Same as contact with the Other and the time of the Other after and beyond that moment of contact. I am and I am not yet my child. Deferral and identity. This is what it means to be the future, not just imagine a perspective on that future in the present. This is why Levinas puts the short and suggestive section on fecundity in the final collection of reflections in Totality and Infinity entitled Beyond the Face. Even as I am obligated to the Other who is my son, the strange temporality of fecundity means I cannot say the son is another, if particularly compelling, face. With futurity, Levinas discovers a time of the subject that disengages the subject from the instant of relation and relationality, and yet is still a relation. This is what we mean by the possible and an openness to (or are we opened by?) the new. A time is possible that both includes me and does not include me. Fecundity brings that time into the play of being and beyond being; I see both myself in my son and his name, and yet glimpse the possible, the future as such as the new, in how he reveals to me my finitude. I will die. He will live. His life is more than his own, however, as he bears in me and how I enacted this same finitude upon my father, his father upon my grandfather, and so on all in his life, which is new, yet looped back into the generational ghost of the surname. But that is about the past. Fecundity, strictly speaking, fixates upon the future at the precise moment I see myself as finite and infinite at one and the same time a double vision of time that makes the future both open and determinate. Levinas writes: 6

The relation with the child that is, the relation with the other that is not a power, but fecundity establishes relationship with the absolute future, or infinite time. The other that I will be does not have the indetermination of the possible, which does, however, bear trace of the fixity of the I that grasps that possible. In power the indetermination of the possible does not exclude the reiteration of the I, which in venturing toward this indeterminate future falls back on its feet, and, riveted to itself, acknowledges its transcendence to be merely illusory and its freedom to delineate but a fateIn fecundity the tedium of this repetition ceases.2 Levinas contrast between power, which contains and maintains the I as executor of the future, and fecundity, which honors the finitude of the I and emphasizes the discontinuity of generations in the inexhaustible youths of the child, is key here. Fecundity wants to break continuity up because, rightly, Levinas wants to de-link the future from the vision I might have of it and want to see repeated in the life of my child. This is the suffocating character of Tradition and perhaps Levinas subtle confrontation with the psychoanalytic notion of the Father. Creating some breathing space outside Tradition, as it were, is also the link between futurity and a poetics of fecundity. Now, on the one hand, Levinas is describing the paternal moment of a wider theory of Eros and incarnation. Indeed, the cluster of reflections in the Beyond the Face section of Totality and Infinity elaborate so many notions of brotherhood, familial relation, femininity and masculinity, and so on that we could read Levinas as simply returning the rather abstract and searching body of the earlier sections in the text to a peculiar, very Levinasian, set of family values. Such a reading would loop the problem of these family values back into prior questions of welcoming, hospitality, Desire, and other issues. In many ways, this is what Derridas decades-long dialogue with Levinas accomplished. But we could also loop these family values forward and beyond the text of Totality and Infinity, setting up all of those implied points of contact that link fecundity and futurity to wider questions of Judaism, Europe, and the meaning of survival after the Second World War. And the fate of the imagination. 7

Catastrophe fundamentally changes the plane of being, and therefore the conditions under which the imagination labors. Indeed, we should hear resonances of theories of trauma, memory, disaster, and the crisis of representation throughout Levinas work. Not only was the Shoah the shadow within which his work labors, as he notes at the opening of the autobiographical essay Signature, but the life long conversation with the work of Maurice Blanchot perhaps the most important French theorist of catastrophe surely saturates the otherwise and often abstract, non-historical languages of immemoriality, witness, and obsession. In Totality and Infinity, we have to read catastrophe in terms of the crisis of futurity and the promise borne by filiation. Futurity is fecundity. In this interval, filiation is reproduced at the very same moment as the future brings the new. Why filiation? Filiation explains two very important features of postcatastrophe life. First, it establishes a certain foundation upon which one can theorize diaspora in this case, a sort of Levinasian account of the embodied, erotic condition of diasporic reproduction. Rather than an atavistic notion of diaspora, which appeals to a common place of origin and manifests itself most emphatically in the zeal (and zealotry) of Zionism, Levinas proposes the particular and singular moment of naming my child. That naming does not have the comforts of atavism, so at no point does or can Levinas claim the reproductive continuity of sameness. My child is not just my future, but also futurity itself. The mineness of the child links the future to the condition of his birth. Such a link, given its elliptical repetition into the past and the past of the past, is diaspora enough. The seeds are scattered, as it were, from a common name, not a common origin or blood or race. Levinas was never much of a materialist and it shows up here in an interesting guise. Second, and just as important, filiation allows Levinas to simultaneously affirm continuity and discontinuity in the new. The new is genuinely new because it belongs to a

different time. The future is not my own; it belongs to my son. This sense of separation rewrites the distance of the ethical with the temporal language of the future and the temporal language of deferral. That is, the time which is not my own is my time in the sense that the son is my son. Perhaps here we can begin to elaborate a Levinasian sense of influence. Not the influence of the predecessor on me, but the influence I have in the peculiar, even paradoxical gift of fecundity. Family resemblance, if only in name, persists, but only on the condition that persistence is placed in a time I cannot ever claim for myself. Deferral gives the newness to the new, while at the same time looping and doubling the time of the future in the signature of me in what will never be mine. Fecundity is poiesis is the gift of the filial new to the future. Between catastrophe and influence, then, a Levinasian poetics of fecundity begins to emerge. When the new presses on the present, a certain break with the past is initiated and the future becomes a place of not just creatureliness, but of creation. Imagination is rooted and therefore un- or de-rooted in the deferral time of futurity. But negotiating that break is difficult. Catastrophe calls into question the meaning of the continuity across discontinuity, a questioning sentiment not all that different than Adornos gloss on Brecht: the house of culture is built on dog shit. For Levinas, this sentiment is expressed in the identification of the Same, the GreekWest, and totalitarianism. And yet there is also difference, otherness, and the Judaic subaltern in Western consciousness and culture. A Levinasian poetics of fecundity is about this moment of disruption, where the break into the future and away from the past retrieves the thread of the surname the Judaic par excellent in order to give a future to self, community, and culture after catastrophe. Dog shit culture already peels itself off the dynamics of influence. Emerging from the fractures of history are the fertile remainders, reproduced in the son of a culture whose future is not yet ours.

The experience of catastrophe therefore raises real questions of representation. In those questions, there is new and productive resonance to Levinasian tropes about the immemorial and witnessing. The immemorial gives a subject to the future, even if it is not in our time. A we to come, registered in the field of aesthetic production. As well, influence becomes not so much a question of Oedipal anxiety, as Harold Bloom so famously claims, precisely because a poetics of fecundity, in this register, is about a radical openness to the future, not a confrontation with the past. Catastrophe kills plenty of poetic fathers; one need only think of Celans profound despair at writing in German or Levinas own refusal to read Heideggers work after Being and Time. But the remainder, which in the analysis of fecundity is that very little, not nothing, of the name of the son. The name in that analysis figures the imaginations ability to think after disaster because the future is obstinate. We always give ourselves over to the future. In giving myself over to a time that is not my own, a Levinasian poetics of fecundity here outlined in the broadest terms names an imagination given over to the future that is not its own. Let me make an abrupt shift here and return to the opening remarks above. How does a shift in geography of both disaster and filiation alter the terms of fecundity and its poetics?

II. I have argued elsewhere that Levinas work, despite its insistence at all levels on disruption and separation, smuggles in an acute sense of unity at the level of the temporal transition to the future.3 It is worth reiterating the key claim here, for, among other things, this feature of Levinas work puts his Eurocentrism in full view. Now, by unity, I of course do not mean a simple identity of the subject with itself. Levinas work of course lobbies for the opposite position. What is in the early work an excess of

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subjectivity becomes, as early as Trace of the Other (1963) and certainly Intentionality and Sensation (196x), a theory of the fractured or broken subject. That work fulfills in many ways the underdeveloped theoretical core of Totality and Infinity. Across Levinas work, the subject is outside itself, not because the Other is too much transcendence for the knowing subject (the epistemological prerogative of Totality and Infinity), but because the transcendence of knowing points back to a prior rupture in the ontology of the subject. For Levinas, this rupture is originary, which means, for ontology, that we can no longer talk about the being of the subject, but only how when, in politics, the subject enters the plane of being it is always as a form of violence. Ontology does not recur as the subject itself. Rather, being appears on the scene only at that moment in which we are called to the Third, justice, and perhaps also the horizon of the messianic. How could we possibly imagine a unity here, when Levinas is so emphatic that the rupture of all elements of subjectivity predates any assemblage, orientation, and action? To be sure, Levinas story of ante- and anti-origins seems to secure difference as irreducible, and yet when we arrive beyond the face in Totality and Infinity, we see that small, not nothing thread of continuity. The paternal relation of fecundity carries at the very least the surname and an identification of me and my body with a life and time not my own. This thread is ostensibly about the future as such, but, as with any temporal horizon, this particular future is bound to a present, which is also, in turn, bound to a past. My son is my son because we share the paternal relation. I too have a father. And so does my father. And so on. Fecundity is at once a future that is not my own and a future I have already lived as the continuity of anothers paternal line. The name itself is enough here, though it also evokes more; Levinas conception of Europe as the Bible and the Greeks shows up at this moment as both the productive condition of his notion of

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difference and the limiting context of disturbance, alterity, and beginning. The son begins as the future of his father and later becomes the past and present of the paternal line, giving himself to a future not his own in his son. Eurocentrism manifests here under the rubric of continuity. While this continuity, in what could be seen as a very Levinasian conceptual twist, is also a condition of dislocation, the fracture of subjectivity maintains a location in the name and place of its becoming. What would it mean to relocate Levinas and, in that relocation, dislocate his sense of location in thinking fecundity? Put more plainly, what if we were to conceive futurity on a more radical model, a model in which the continuity of time was not only off the conceptual table, as it were, but an existential and historical impossibility? In a certain sense, we could say that the New World is both a world and new because of catastrophic experience. The compound and compounding disaster of genocide, conquest, the slave trade, plantation slavery, and colonialism is not a companion of the history of the Americas, but the founding wound. Indeed, the very name Americas bears within it so much pain and traumatic memory. A world was made in the Americas in each of those disasters, one folded upon another, which gives a whole new dimension to Walter Benjamins famous characterization of history as an ever-growing pile of wreckage. The newness of that world, and I here want to focus on the Caribbean context in particular, is only possible because of the utter decimation of what came before (memory of Africa) and what pre-dated conquest (the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean). The Middle Passage, slavery, and genocide of indigenous peoples form the catastrophic event called the New World and therefore set the terms of beginning.

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Conceived in terms of beginning and the new, the New World context changes temporality in important, transformative ways. Whereas the time of Europe operates according to a threaded past-present-future saturated, especially in the twentieth century, beginning in the New World context is traumatic at the point of commencement. Catastrophe does not interrupt the flow of historical and memorial time, but instead starts time out of the abyss of loss. Glissant opens his Poetics of Relation with a sustained reflection on just this question. The abyss, on Glissants account, figures the experience of the ocean in the Middle Passage and elaborates on the epigraphs to the work from Derek Walcott (Sea is history) and Kamau Brathwaite (The unity is sub-marine). From Walcott and Brathwaite, Glissant gleans the crucial insight that the people (unity) called Caribbean begin in a history that is an abyss. The abyss marks the absolute gap between Africa and the New World, cleaving Glissants theory of time and beginning from atavistic stories of rooted being. The loss is punctuated by what Glissant calls the balls and chains gone green the drown memory of those thrown overboard in the Middle Passage. What is the temporality of this trauma? Glissant writes: In actual fact the abyss is a tautology: the entire ocean, the entire sea gently collapsing in the end into the pleasures of sand, make one vast beginning, but a beginning whose time is marked by these balls and chains gone green.4 The shoreline is the end, the point of arrival, and there beginning is figured as the crashing of the sea on the sand. Disembarking makes a world, even if that making is the traumatic bewilderment of forced migration. With the sea as history, a womb abyss that births a unity at the shoreline, Glissant gathers together the three-fold structure of time with a wholly different set of breaks and fractures. The past (the African river and shoreline) is subjected to the present (the bodies thrown overboard, figuring loss and trauma in the decomposition of balls and chains at the seas bottom) and is then

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handed over to the possible future (the fractal shoreline of the New World geography of the Caribbean). The past and present emerge here as abyssal. Atavism is drown in the Middle Passage, which means that memory of the past is settled into fragments without prior unity. The present the wake of both the plantation and the colonial relation is a site of alienation. The New World means a traumatic loss of memory, and what takes its place is the imposition of a foreign measure. Frantz Fanons famous remark in Black Skin, White Masks that to speak a language is to adopt a whole culture is instructive here; the metropolitan measure can only alienate the colonized. In theorizing beginning and futurity, then, Glissant performs a kind of phenomenological historical reduction: there is no past, there is no present, and so there is only the imagination of a future. This austere temporal space is underpinned by the notion of the unknown. Glissant writes: For us, and without exception, and no matter how much distance we may keep, the abyss is also a projection of and a perspective into the unknown. Beyond its chasm we gamble on the unknown. We take sides in this game of the world. We hail a renewed Indies; we are for it.5 The Middle Passage and arrival in the New World is traumatic, leaving the past at the bottom of the sea, but, with the unknown, Glissant theorizes beginning after trauma and loss in order to take account of the fecundity of the abyss. That is, the abyss opens the future as the new. A renewed Indies is an Indies for itself for the first time. Rather than the temporality of atavism (retrieving the past) or the temporality of mimicry (redeeming the present through assimilation), Glissant proposes the newness of creolization. Creolization and the composite cultural productions it generates builds out of the fragments of the past and present, privileging chaos and improvisation over threads of unity and nostalgia for cultural foundations. Sites of loss and the multiple sites of alienation leave fragments behind. Those fragments, a sort of collection of cultural found-objects, arrive through a painful past and present precisely because the Caribbean 14

was from the beginning a globalized space a crossroads of language, religion, food, gesture, and all of those forms of life that travel through the life of commerce, toil, and conflict. The key in thinking about the new in this context, however, is thinking about composite culture as a production into the future, rather than an assemblage of cultural objects with a back-dated history and memory. Creolization makes for the first time. Fecundity is not creation ex nihilo, but neither is it reproduction and continuity. A new sense of the new is necessary to account for emergent and constantly emerging forms of creolized cultural life and identity. The new is proposed, then, as the possible future, formed by what Glissant calls the imaginary. Glissants imaginary no Lacanian concept names the capacity of thinking to remake or make for the first time the meaning and sense of the world. The experience of the Middle Passage and the colonial structure of the Caribbean (and the Americas as such, perhaps) structures the present as multiple forms of alienation. The imaginary intervenes, decisively, against alienation. Glissant does not endorse forgetting; to be sure, he memorably ends the first section of Poetics of Relation at the shoreline, remembering the imperative to honor the boats. Catastrophe conditions the Caribbeans peculiar experience of fecundity. Yet, Glissant does not remember the boats as an interruption of the futures becoming, but instead encounters the past as a sort of ghost in need of welcoming, respect, and honoring. Painful memory does not stall or halt the dynamics of creolization. The new is therefore an imperative that derives its normative purchase from the abyssal past whose honoring is not the painful stasis of melancholia, but instead the compulsion, against all forms of alienation in the present, to generate a new imaginary that remembers the pain of the past, resists the terrible and terrifying habits of colonial alienation, and commits itself to the new.

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Without the comfort and familiarity of atavistic thinking, Glissants creative horizon is all the more precarious. Indeed, the contrast Glissant draws between continental and archipelagic forms of thinking illustrates this perfectly. Continental thinking understands cultural formation on the model of the root and the fixed border a continent. This is the fantasy of nationalism: the meaning and significance of a people is geographically and spiritually bordered. In those borders, a culture is fully cultivated on its own terms. Archipelagic thinking begins with scattering and fragmentation. The archipelago of the Caribbean is both the geographic figure for radical thinking and the historical experience of fragmentation at every level of the self and community. Fragmentation, when originary, makes the appeal to roots impossible, so the imaginary means everything. Faced by fragments in the present and a past that itself only fragments, the imaginary crafts a future without appeal to prior unity of continuity. So, the imaginary produces composite culture out of fragments; this is a poetics of fecundity that does not thread the past, but assembles for the first time. Creolization is set free in the play of the imaginary by fragmentation, for the items put in relation in creolizing work are de-linked from the past and, in the creative intervention of cultural production of the son from the womb abyss, those items shed the sense of alienation that comes from the (continental) habit of linking fragments to an original. How are we to think about this creolizing moment? What is the meaning of production and reproduction fecundity as futurity in this shift of geography from Europe to Europes Other? How, that is, does or ought Levinas work look different in the frame of another cultural and political history? Initially, one might point to a simple difference of geography, which, in the end, amounts to a difference of historical experience. Levinas work appeals to the European Jewish

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experience, which is European in its rooted sense of continuity and Jewish in its sense of being marginalized. This doubled character of historical experience in many ways defines Levinas work from the beginning, whether that be the formal analysis of the intersection of transcendence in the plane of immanent experience or the metanarrative of the Abrahamic figure who wanders without promise of return alongside the Odysseus whose journey is always back home. As well, the continuity of tradition and community practice cited as the continuity of the name in the analysis of fecundity and futurity is a very different sense of diaspora and diasporic consciousness. In repetition of tradition, which in its own way appeals to the root and the border, the Jewish diaspora maintains continuity in the experience of discontinuity, persecution, marginalization, and genocidal violence. The African diasporic experience in the Americas has another time, as we have seen. It is the historical experience of an abyssal beginning. The scattering of forced migration and the memory of mass suffering and death, while it shares certain formal characteristics with Levinas historical experience, is archipelagic in its moment of conceiving the future. There is no messianic fantasy in Glissants work to redeem, even just in promise, the brokenness of history. In fact, one could read his meditation on epic, myth, and filiation in Poetics of Relation as an elaborate distinction of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora from other diasporic experiences. Without the root and border, the imaginary is charged with a different task: assembling composite cultural forms as both a mode of resistance and a way of saying yes to life. There are two possible responses to this initial (and genuine) sense of difference. First, there is the common though wholly not identical experience of catastrophe. Perhaps one could say that Europe and the Americas burden under the same question of how to live after so much violence. And perhaps in that common question there is a point of theoretical contact and

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poetic reconciliation, if not a certain kind of sameness. Second, there is the question of a poetic principle: how does the experience of an open future generate a notion of cultural production connected to what we could call the geography of fecundity? That is, perhaps one could isolate the experience of the new as necessary and commanding in the moment of creation, linking the new to figures of reproduction and historical experience. And perhaps in that common poetic imperative there is a point of aesthetic contact and mutual transformation. This first response, which interrogates the meaning of living after catastrophe, is promising, but has certain, decisive limits. The experience of Africans in the Americas is one of total catastrophe, an abyssal beginning in which continuity is shattered and whatever fragments remain do not assemble into an original or even a copy of the original. Instead, there is the radically new in an interval that addresses and transforms multiple forms of alienation. Europe does not have this sense of multiple alienation, even in the experience of anti-Semitism and antiSemitic violence. Indeed, Europe experiences a very difference sense of loss. Europes is a loss that remembers and mourns. Diasporic consciousness in the European context is continental in its tone and content, so the loss and memory of that loss is structured from the outset by the interplay of continuity, rupture, discontinuity, and reproduction. Levinas notion of fecundity works across this very interplay. Glissants Caribbean is melancholic at the shoreline and begins for the first time. To theorize the meaning of catastrophe in that context is to account for the experience of total violence and the enigma of survival amidst composite cultural forms. In the European context, it is a question not just of how the people were subjected to such violence in the twentieth century. It is also a question of how the people lived from violence for so long. Europe, after all, was a machine of death and suffering, run for the profit of the continent, for

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four and a half centuries. The limits of thinking European and Caribbean catastrophe at the same time are clear at this very moment. The second response opens up a very different relation between Levinas reflection on fecundity and Glissants imperative of the new. In theorizing a poetics of fecundity, we can see how the problem of futurity presses with exceptional force on both diasporic experiences. The decimating violence of history produces a certain kind of traumatic memory transhistorical and transgenerational in its character which provokes, perhaps as a matter of survival and hope, a confrontation with modernity and the forms of life it bequeaths to our century. Reckoning with that bequeathal opens up the very questions of this essay: What about modernity alienates? How can we think outside those alienating remnants and habits? How does the past thread into the future in ways both productive and violent? And how can we negotiate a future that purges the violence in the interest of a just relation between often opaque cultural forms and practices? A poetics is crucial for intervening productively in these questions. While the historical stakes of these problematics resonate differently (at times radically so) in the European and Caribbean contexts, there is surely something to be gained by putting the Levinasian account of the future in (creolizing) contact with those, like Glissant, who also see futurity as a critical, radical, and ultimately liberatory break with the past and the present it has given us. By way of conclusion, then, let me close with a suggestive detour through the creolist manifesto loge de la crolit published in 1989. The manifesto, jointly authored by Martiniquan intellectuals Jean Bernab, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphal Confiant, is a significant site for reflection precisely because it is written to the future, not the present and certainly not with nostalgia for the past. In the work, Bernab, et. al. rewrite Caribbean intellectual history in the frame of Glissants affirmation of archipelagic thinking, critically

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assessing the legacies of Csaire, Fanon, and so the Surrealist, Negritude, and black existentialist movements. Across that rewriting, which is at times painfully polemical, the authors work from Glissants account of the activity of creolization, toward an identity formation called Creoleness. I say toward because this is a form of aesthetic and cultural life that is only being born; the future is in full view, but not yet given shape, contour, and dimension. The authors write: Because of its constituent mosaic, Creoleness (crolit) is an open specificity. It escapes, therefore, perceptions which are not themselves open. Expressing it is not expressing a synthesis, not just expressing a crossing or any other unicity. It is expressing a kaleidoscopic totality, that is to say: the nontotalitarian consciousness of a preserved diversityOur aesthetics cannot exist (cannot be authentic) without Creoleness.6 The parenthetical here is crucial. Authenticity is at stake, and yet there is no root to the claim of authentic character or trait. We must, the authors insist, think authenticity without center, formal boundaries, or teleology. At the same time, there is specificity in the openness of Creoleness-asidentity. A paradox, really, but a constituent and productive paradox: though open to the fragments and composite cultural forms that the imaginary makes possible, crolit must be thought in its specificity. That is, futurity is open, but structured by an encounter with geography, location, and the convergence of certain historical experiences in that site. Diversity, which is nothing other than an ethical relation to opaque cultural fragments and remnants, becomes the ethical regulative ideal for a poetics of fecundity. And is that not the very problem of futurity in a nutshell? It surely poses the ethical in a new site: the interval between the cruelty of the world we inherit and the possibility of thinking another place. How, in a poetics that is committed to the difficult relation of production of the new and structures of reproduction in every production, is fecundity to help us think about the Other without the habits of totalitarian thinking? Another world is (maybe) possible. Certainly another poetics is possible, and another world is certainly not possible without another poetics.

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* A final note. There is a familiar and important story in Levinas scholarship about the fate of the aesthetic. Art traffics in representation, carrying materiality into formalization, which, in the end, is surmounted by the infinity of its first condition: the life of the interhuman. The aesthetic is therefore a form of violence. Levinas strange Platonism. Perhaps an abstract violence, one enacted in the ethically alienated work of imagination, but a violence nonetheless. From this set of characterizations, art falls under epistemological critique, rather than critical to the meaning of subjectivity. I think the problem of futurity, when read in the context of catastrophe, poetics, and thinking through the remainder, changes things a bit. Levinas account of reproduction addresses the difficult task of thinking against tradition while folding something about the present (and the past) into the future. But, as we see in a shift of geography, there is a certain decadence to that break with tradition. In another geography, the poetics of fecundity prove more than a mere aesthetic principle or intervention against what suffocates modern life. Poetics and the aesthetic more generally function as the condition of the possibility of a first, new life a sense of life written under a new imperative. The imperative of the Afro-Caribbean context could not be more urgent: from the abyss, born out of a terrifying womb, the imagination makes for the first time. Imagining a world is the work of creolization; composite culture has to be produced out of the fragments of historys great violence. At that moment of producing out of the fragments of history, there is an important question opened up from the Caribbean and, more widely, the New World. How has Europe managed to fantasize its identity apart from the many centuries spent in, and living from, the

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catastrophe of the Americas? One of the key tasks of the twenty-first century, to my mind, is returning Europe to the life it lived from violence. For centuries. In that return, we have to ask questions about how deeply indebted certain forms of cultural and political life are to that identity-as-machine-of-violence.7 Creolization, I would suggest, is key to undoing that debt. So, in the context of the present essay, what would it mean to not just bring Levinas into a moment of productive relation to Caribbean notions of futurity and reproduction, but, in a double-back, to bring the thinking of the Caribbean back to Europe as a form of decolonizing the colonizer. Not as external critique, but as the very interior of the meaning of Europe. Centuries of economic, political, and cultural involvement in Africa, Asia, and the Americas cannot be nothing to the identity of a place. I do not think that is a radical claim. And yet we have not begun to take that seriously in reading, in this case, Levinas work as a work in need of decolonization not for the sake of political critique, but, more profoundly in the interest of elaborating a wider theory of a poetics of fecundity appropriate to what Glissant, in naming the twenty-first century, simply called tout-monde. John E. Drabinski Amherst College Spring 2011 1 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trs. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univesity Press, 1990, 277.
2 3

Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 268.

See my Future Interval: On Levinas and Glissant, in Totality and Infinity at 50, eds. Scott Davidson and Diane Perpich. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2011 and Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011, Chapter Four.
4

douard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trs. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000, 6.
5

Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 8. 22

Jean Bernab, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphal Confiant, In Praise of Creoleness (bilingual edition), trans., M.B. Taleb-Khyar. Paris: Gallimard, 1993, 89.
7

For an initial and revealing foray into these questions, Paul Gilroys Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) is an especially helpful model.

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