Feasibility

So far this study has argued for a shift in the vocabulary of decolonial ethics: from alterity to opacity, from exile to errancy, from root identity to relational identity (‘expansive belonging’), and from hospitality to solidarity – where solidarity allows a reconsideration of politics, as Nitzan Lebovic puts it, ‘not as a binary relation between friend and enemy, but as a network … united against abuse and coercive power’. In arguing for this shift, this study has advanced a politicised sense of responsibility that works to demand opacity against state and market forces as well as to break from familiar identifications, such as one's nation and class. The promise of re-description is that it re-presents ‘responsibility’, suggesting different associations with the term, different ways of hearing it and thinking about it. An alternative understanding leads to aberrant actions. In other words, the promise of our shift in linguistic practices lies in our non-linguistic practices, our bearings of engagement with the world. If this is right, then it would be instructive to elaborate on what makes possible relational politics as well as to describe already ongoing practices that exemplify such relational work. Such an elaboration is the task of this chapter.

Among the francophone Left of his generation, Glissant was famous for saying we must ‘put the poetic back into the heart of the political’. To some this sounds like a superficial aesthetic statement, a fundamental misunderstanding of materialist politics, or perhaps, at best, a call for richer language in slogans and speeches. Even if these were the only ways to hear Glissant's point, it should not be underestimated. As Martin Puchner's scholarship shows, Marx's Manifesto was successful as a political provocation in part because of its reinvention of a genre. Of course, there are other ways to hear Glissant's saying. As Loichot has commented, ‘Poetry, for Glissant, is not just the art of accommodating words in a lyrical mode by the use of sound, rhythm, or metaphorical language.’ ‘Poetry also means “making” in a material way’, she continues: ‘Poétrie, the seeming neologism that Glissant uses in French, evokes simultaneously the poem, inhabited by the English word “poetry”, and the verb pétrir, to knead dough or to give shape to clay.’