'Of These One and All I Weave the Song of Myself’

Poetics of Relation presents a powerful account of Relation. “Relation is an open totality evolving upon itself” whose elements “don’t blend” nor “lose themselves” in relation; instead, “each element can keep its… essential quality, even as it accustoms itself to the essential qualities and differences of others.” In its most absolute formulation, Relation enables “a relational practice affirming the multiplicity and diversity of components." The subject of relation “is not: (of) Being, but: —(of) beings”; there is no “Non-Being… except outside of Relation”, for Relation facilitates the existence of all beings through the relation with the self, as it is through Relation that beings come into being. Insofar as Relation is total, it is the primordial condition of beings in the world to come into being. However, Relation exceeds the bounds of traditional Western metaphysics by facilitating a connection not only with the thought of the other, a constitutive object of the mind that reaffirms the self, but the other of Thought. It is Relation that enables the haunting connection to the other of Thought, an Other with such alterity that it lacks representation in Thought, which exerts an ethereal pressure to cause one to “have to act… [and] change [one’s] thought, without renouncing its contribution.” Relation remains as a set of relations that is total, constitutive, mutualist, mutable, and autotelic.