The Colonial Abyss

This chapter extends the meaning of the abyss by giving it a concrete and contextualized shape. The chapter probes complex crossings that take place at the intersection of the mystical and the political by investigating the colonial impasse from which the Afro-Caribbean decolonial imagination of the (post)negritude movement emerges. In the writings of the Caribbean thinkers one witnesses an extended notion of identity based on relational ontology; the story of the shattered other shapes the very contours of the collective history from which the traumatized self emerges. It is, then, in this very middle, the groundless site lying between the traumatizing past and the dumbfounded present, between fragmentation and reconstruction, and between suffering and redemption, where one begins to reflect upon the possibility of passage, of beginning after trauma. The possibility of the reconstruction of the traumatized self is reconsidered in the extended notion of identity based on relational ontology found in the writings of the Afro-Caribbean thinkers. A comparative reading of Glissant and contemporary continental philosophers (Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Rosi Braidotti) molds the contour of colonial difference emerging in Glissant’s decolonial vision.

The Dialectical Abyss

This chapter examines explicitly the ethico-philosophical meaning of the abyss by locating its trace in German idealism and Hegel. Jakob Bohme’s elaboration of the abyss as Ungrund (groundlessness) and Schelling’s appropriation of it paves the way for the transition from mysticism to dialectic through Hegel. A close reading of Hegel demonstrates that while the trace of the abyss is underdeveloped in Hegel, it nevertheless structures his dialectical system. The abyss signals the moment or movement of passage from the negative to the positive, through which the shattered self transforms its eroded ground into the condition of a new possibility. The terms of such reconstruction or passage are interrogated by engaging both Judith Butler’s feminist and Slavoj Zizek’s materialist readings of Hegel.

The Mystical Abyss

This chapter examines the notion of the abyss as it has been developed within the tradition of Western philosophy and theology. It traces the abyss back to its first inception in Neoplatonic philosophy by Plato and his Timaeus, followed by Plotinus who develops the traces of panentheist mysticism lurking in Plato’s system into the seed of negative theology. In the Neoplatonic tradition and medieval mysticism of Pseudo-Dioysius and Meister Eckhart, the abyss points to the theological crossroad in which finitude and infinity, creaturely vulnerability and divine potency intersect with each other. The paradoxical path of via negativa renders the abyss a site of uncertainty and unknowing in which both God and the self are uncreated (Eckhart). Subsequently, the ethical implication or potential of the abyss is probed via the works of contemporary philosophers (Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, Slavoj Zizek) who engage negative theology from a postmodern perspective.

Conclusion

In Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche writes, “When you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you.”1 The journey that I have taken in this book can be read, perhaps, as an act of staring into the abyss. Perhaps, to be more accurate, the path that my inquiry has taken through the chapters of this book might be better described as “plunging into” the abyss rather than just gazing on it. As I have been consistently arguing, the abyss, after all, cannot be restricted to matters of epistemology. Rather, it signals an ontological question. What, then, does the abyss that stares back at us look like? What happens to us as we gaze upon the abyss and as it gazes back upon us?...

Situating the Self in the Abyss

This chapter sets the stage for a general overview of the key themes, questions, and the methodological framework of the book. It begins with the questions that Martinican thinkers Frantz Fanon and Edouard Glissant raise regarding the possibility of constructing the being, self, and collective identity in the context of colonial oppression. A brief review of philosophical discourses and critical theories that address questions of race, (post)coloniality, and the global state of trans-spatiality (diasporization) such as Kant, theories of cosmopolitanism, postcolonial theory, and Latin American decolonial thought (“the decolonial turn”) will provide the framework for theorizing some of the central terms undergirding the book. These contesting discourses provide the various frameworks with which to read the abyss from diverse perspectives.

Creolizing Cosmopolitics

This chapter explores the possibility of using the reconceptualized notion of groundless ground as a new framework from which to envision a new form of self, of thinking and inhabiting the world, differently. A comparative reading of Glissant’s poetic, a poetic of resistance he calls “forced poetic,” and of continental philosophers’ theopoetic (Derrida, Caputo, Kearney, Keller), suggests the poetic as an epistemological alternative and political instrument that enables the possibility of an open cosmopolitical future and a relational self, born in the wombs of pain and trauma.

Introduction

Afuera hay sol.No es más que un solpero los hombres lo mirany después cantan.Yo no sé del solYo sé de la melodía del ángely el sermón calientedel último viento.Sé gritar hasta el albacuando la muerte se posa desnuda en mi sombra....