“Nothing is True, everything is living”
English translation of the reading without Glissant’s commentary and the discussion
© Alexandre Leupin
This reading is part of a great poem that I am writing and which will be called, “Nothing is True, everything is living”. And this part that I am going to read you, which I have had in mind for a very long time, and that today I have outed on paper without little control – but the control will come from you – I read it to you First, then I will comment briefly on it, and afterwards we shall, if you wish, discuss on the of reading and commentary.
So here’s the reading …
Expression
Is there a language of truth? A speech? Certainly not, but of whomever claims it. Just as there is not a language of living. But nothing is living that, however, does not express itself. Thus the expression of the living speaks as a language, whereas the expression of truth may be its denial or hidden silence. But if we distinguish language and speech we see that there is no language of what could be the Truth. This is to say, the language of truth carries on and practices in no language, where the living knows neither language nor speech. For the living is expressed in nothing, except in his own transport, and Truth flows by force through him who claims it. And who therefore confuses language and speech in his pretension.
Continuity
If we suppose that nothing is true, we overstep continuity, apart from the continuity of concrete things which have no need of capital letters. For Truth , capitalized, does not goes through anything, the Absolute isn’t anything. And the Absolute is True only insofar as it surpasses the absolute. Thus there is no continuity from truth to truth, and any continuity is in the falsity of things, which we have to fight. But living is continuity itself which, if it ceases, gets into rest – what we call death – to prepare another continuity. Thus, the cessation of continuity in the language of who claims truth is a decisive end, which leaves room only for useful truths. But the end of continuity of the living questions us endlessly, not on useful things, but on unexpected passages. The continuity of Truth does not loop in any way, it is a fragile line of fire. The continuity of the living is a spiral, which is not afraid to break.
Rupture
And not only the living is not afraid to stop, but it seems that the rupture is one of the steps of its advance. The rupture of the living is often the chance that is in it and that builds it, unmaking it for an elsewhere or an otherwise. Chance is rupture and at the same time continuity in the living, without the need of a dialectics. Without the cunning perspective of a dialectics, there is only a rupture in the possibilities of truth; then rupture is in no way a break in continuity. That is why we never know whether an advance is a progress in the living and whether it is desirable that we ever know it, or what progress is. And so the living flies away from the truth, leaving only the concrete truths of made things, which are unpredictable. The thought of truth conceives the unpredictable, but is forever foreign to it, for it fears the rupture which moves away from the Absolute.
On obscurity
While it is true that the True also proclaims itself in the dark, which is random rupture and non-language, at the same time, it is particularly living that the obscurity of Truth is Darkness; whereas it is true that the obscurity of the living is pure opacity. Opacity is beneficial to us when whereas Darkness stops us. We grow in the opaque, it is the freedom of the living. Also, opacity opens up for us the gesture and the operation by which we invite the truths of concrete things, and change them. We change the order of concrete things, whereas we disdain modifying the absolute of Darkness. Your opacity is mine, we are alive, we invite, it is the same freedom and it is the same emotion from the You to the different. Your darkness, my darkness, on the contrary, are fighting, daughters of the absolute, like two samenesses that are tearing themselves off from the same resolve.
Interference
The interference of the living is its reformation in its very expression. It is a mixture that distinguishes between the mixes, transforming them. The interference is momentum and rupture and brutal innovation, which nevertheless is continuity, like the nectar to the flower. It is a mix of impulses that distinguish between flowers, keeping them as such, as it transforms while maintaining and maintains while transforming. The Truth is only a mixing of Absolute and Big Darkness, for it does not transform or maintain, even if it sustains. The living is always Creole, he rejoins his diversity. Truth hesitates by the rivers and the seas, outside the line of what is born. We had so much need of truth when we did not know what a frontier is or what two flavors create. The living answers us and Truth makes us envy. We may mix them up, in the middle of a bay.
Commentary by Édouard Glissant
Here is the text I wanted to read to you at the beginning of the discussion that we could have between the notions of “true” and “living”. So I totally agree that it’s pretty much incomprehensible, but it’s at first sight only. This is not only the backbone of a poem, but also the rumination of a philosophy.
Someone asked me yesterday why there is a capital T in “Truth” while there is no capital for “living”. It is because Truth with a capital T is distinguished from the truth of concrete things, from the everyday truths that we pursue, which sometimes deceive us but whose deviations or excesses we have the means to correct. Whereas True with a capital T refers to an absolute we always dream of, whose fluxes we have neither means to direct nor to correct when this Truth brings delusions or deviations from ourselves. That is why any analysis of ourselves hesitates between whether we accept the presence of Truth as absolute. Is there a Truth, as absolute, that we must accept? Is there a Truth as absolute that deceives us? These questions that arise in connection with the “True” with a capital letter do not arise in relation to the real (small v) which concerns the daily concrete things. What I mean in this beginning of the text is that we do not ask these questions about the living. The mechanisms of life can be unknown to us. We can discover them little by little according to the progress of knowledge of the sciences and elsewhere in completely different directions. There may be a knowledge of the living which passes by a sublimated intuition or a knowledge of the living which passes through a meticulous examination. In my opinion, both directions are equally valid and may even come together one day. But in any case we have no anxiety about the knowledge of the living except when it comes to our own body and we ask ourselves questions. But we have an anxiety about the knowledge of truth as an absolute. For we ask ourselves whether this true Absolute Being does not direct us without our knowing it. And it is evident that people who reflect on the organization of the spirit or of the instinct of the human being or soul are not sure of asserting their knowledge of a patent truth of truth with a great V You have understood perhaps in the beginning of this text that my position is that the Absolute of Truth is threatening because it does not conceive the mixture and that the absolute of the living is fantastic because it is not conceived Not without mixing. There is no true living with a great V. There are only living ones with a mixture at the beginning and a mixture all along the chain of living. And that consequently the positions which I maintain in poetics and philosophy, which are the positions of the mixture, are closer to the passion of the living than to the sublimation of truth. This is what I have tried to say when speaking of the expression of continuity, of rupture, of obscurity and of interference. Is there any interest in choosing the mix of the living rather than the absolute of the True with a capital V? Is there an opposition between the two? It seems to me that these are interesting questions to ask not to know the truth nor to know at the end what is this rather than that, but which are interesting to ask because no impulse of poetry can These issues. And even if one gives up a kind of conclusion that would be a rejection of this for the benefit of that, it is none the less true that it is necessary, in my opinion, if one wishes to feel the impulse of one’s being, And the impulse of the other, that one must navigate the shores of the true and the living.
Discussion with the public
Noudelmann: Even with this distinction you make between the true and the living, you say that there is a truth of Relationship, a word you often write with a capital “R”. And would you say that there is an advance in creolization, a progress of creolization?
Glissant: So interesting and so far away from us, the question of Truth and life … It is obvious that there is progress and it is obvious that there is no progress. It is evident that we are in continuous progress, but it is also evident, I feel, that my being, my spirit, my soul, my drive, my strength, my weakness are not a progress compared to a caveman’s. Not at all. I have benefices that he does not have, advantages he does not have, attitudes that he does not have. He may have fears that I do not have anymore, but maybe I have fears he did not have. In this respect, I think that we cannot talk about progress. It is certain that mankind started with a division, like a primordial egg which divides and ramifies. We are constantly finding all the stems that have left Africa in all directions, and the point surely was a matter of isolating differences in order to better defend them. It is also absolutely certain that today we have reversed the poetic steam, which is to say that we are beginning to understand that differences are not necessarily to be isolated and defended. We begin to grasp, for example, that we understand ourselves better by understanding others better and that, therefore, from the point of view of the progress of civilizations and cultures, “barbarous” peoples are those who isolate their differences in order to better defend them .And so there is a very clear progress of creolization, even if today what predominates in the world is the sectarian and cruel defense of the One and the Same.
NF: On continuity and rupture … In fact, both in poetry as well as in philosophy, we could very well distinguish all thinkers and all poets who are on the side of continuity and those who are on the side of rupture. So you have overcome this opposition by showing that there were ruptures but that they were nevertheless always taken up in a continuity, in a retention. So, in spite of everything, is there still not – and you have evoked death- something that cannot be redeemed, something that is forever lost, whether in intimacy, or in the dramas of history …Is there not irremediable losses that no succession, that no continuity enables to maintain, except in the form of a memory, and again, if this memory is not unspeakable … Aren’t there things that are forever lost?
EG: Of course there are things that are forever lost. But what we have learned is not to attach ourselves to the crippling, throbbing, and sometimes distorting memories of those forever lost things, we have learn to try creating others. What is human culture? It consists trying to create – I would not say “values” – I do not believe in the notion of “value” -, trying to create objects of desire that may be of the nature of a poem, a toy, a story, an evocation, the nature of a dish that we taste, and that … Well, there are surely dishes cooked at the time of the caverns that I would have liked to eat, but it is lost forever. In my opinion this kind of question does not arise in the play of rupture and continuity which constitutes the structure of Being as an individual and the structure of Being as a community.
Inaudible question from the audience (34.04)
EG: What I would like to point out is that you can say “I am Truth,” but we cannot say “I am the alive one.” We always say “I am alive”, we do not say “I am the alive one”. And we say “I am Truth” because it is the absolute of Relation that is “I am Truth”. “I am true,” would be relative. “I am the Truth” is an absolute. When one says “I am alive”, it is a relative that is still an absolute, because one cannot say “I am the living one”. One cannot say “I am the living one” because one cannot conceive one’s own death in this variant. And therefore the question remains of the relation of Truth and the living. The question remains because the living is changing, while Truth is transformed but does not change. Truth can be burned, reduced to ashes, thrown over the waters of the river … it is true. But the living changes, transforms itself into itself. It changes in itself. The interference of the living is an interference into itself. It is not a mixture that projects outwards, towards the waters of the river, into the ashen earth. The living in its mixture is inside of itself. When the cells of elemental bodies change, they change into themselves; that is why I think there is a call to diversity in the living, whereas in Truth there isn’t. There is a superb call – and, as Hugo would say, “generous” – for a domination of the absolute which is not a domination, while being a domination.
Celia Britton: I love this phrase: “the truth is something concrete.” I wonder what the relationship is between this “concrete truth” and this concept of living things which, from a more traditional point of view, would be equal to the organic ones. Is that the same thing?
EG: The living has its own transformation in itself. The concrete doesn’t, except the living concrete of rivers, volcanoes, mountains that transform themselves. But a chair does not transform by itself, even if it can be improved. The difference between the truth of concrete things and the living being is that the transformation of the living and the mixtures of the living are in the living being, which is not the case with concrete things.
Question from the audience (42:50): Can the rigidity of truth hinder the movement of the living being, its transformation?
EG: Sometimes yes and sometimes no. We need the absolute of Truth is very much. Often it is detrimental to us. Often. But it is certain that human cultures have often transcended themselves not through the sense of the living, but through the passion of Truth, up to the point where they began consider that this truth had to be imposed on others. This is the case of all major Mediterranean religions. They have imposed their truth on others, but that does not mean that the passion for truth did not exist in these others. It would be wrong to deny it. Now at the juncture where we are the movement of humankinds, I think the tension of multiple is more advantageous today than a passion for truth, because it is still a passion for Truth, it is never the Passion for the Truth, which does not exist. But I think that today the tension of the multiplicity of the living is what assists us the most in the complexity of the world and in the unpredictability of the world. That I really believe. And also that one must be careful as well, not to make a passion of a new kind of the tension of multiplicity.
You know that I have created the word “globality” to oppose it to the word “globalization”. But we are here in the realm of categories, that is, of what one can or cannot do, of what one can conceive or not, whereas when we speak of Truth and the living, we quit the territory of categories. Perhaps we are entering the territory of entropies but we can live with a poetics of globality by having a passion for truth, and we can live a poetics of globalness by having an attention for the living. Both are conceivable. I do not know if they are livable but both are conceivable. Globalness is but the way for us to be able to animate our actions and our reflections in the face of a dissolving power that is the power of globalization. Faced with the power of globalization, there is but one way to resist: it is to conceive of what is beneath globalization, that is to say of globalness, as a factor of development – I do not speak of economic development, etc. – but as a factor of the development of Being. And consequently, it is of the order of the feasible, it is a category and it is at the same time a poetics. But there cannot be a poetics of Truth and a poetics of life. Truth and living are different. There may be a poetic which is inspired by Truth, it would be a mystical poetics, or there may be a poetics inspired by the living; It would be a poetic like mine, a poetics of creolization. But globalness is another question.
Noudelmann:Is there a politics of the living? Today there is a concern about the environment. Are you sensitive to it? Should this be thought of as a preservation of the living? Or can we think of a politics of the living as a participation in what is unpredictable in life?
EG: There are two questions in this question. If it is about a politics of the living of planet earth, I totally agree. But if it is about a politics of the living of the human being, I am fiercely opposed to it, because the living of the Being develops, as I have said, by itself. This is what distinguishes it from the truth of things. The living develops in itself and if the scalpel is put into it by trying to make clones, we introduce into this chain of unpredictability – for the living is unpredictable – a predictability of death. As far as the life of the planet is concerned, I am of course agreeing on the measures that can be taken, however with this proviso: are we sure that we know the laws and the intimate mechanisms of the functioning of the living on the planet? Surely not. And so this is a serious question: for sure, the forests must be preserved, and the writers must stop writing 2000 pages novels (I am kidding). Sure, there are things to be done, but are we sure that the planet does not heals itself as it goes, even if in the meantime it crushes us? Are we sure that our fate – that of the humankinds – is linked to the fate of the planet? Maybe the planet can crush us and continue to … So I do not believe in absolute knowledge in this area. That means that here too, nothing is True.
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