Glissant and the Politics of Coordination

This is an ironic moment for Edouard Glissant’s growing community of readers. So many are discovering Glissant’s work for the first time, myself included, in part because a fervent commitment to a politics of recognition now dominates in many corners of the humanities. This is ironic largely because while the choice to engage with Glissant might be motivated by an all too generalized logic of recognition, to read Glissant is to learn about how the basic premises underpinning this logic are deeply misguided. The politics of recognition, as a term of art, after all, is built on the conceptual planks made available by the standardizing impulses of the nation-state form and capitalism combined. Glissant, on the other hand, is nothing if not a theorist calling fervently for a path forward that does not depend on the complicities found in the conceptual imperialism inherent to the bureaucratic standardizing practices that bolster both the nation-state and contemporary capitalism. Glissant calls instead for an approach that offers the philosophical building blocks for a politics of coordination, which is described in Patchell Markell’s book, Bound by Recognition (2003) as a politics of acknowledgement. This politics entails forgingan alternative approach to the self and other, to identity and place, and to social orders in general than what the politics of recognition espouses.