Édouard Glissants opacitetsbegrepp

Sammanfattning: This paper presents the concept of opacity as a philosophical concept in Édouard Glissants writing in Le Discours Antillais (1981), Poétique de la Relation (1990) and Philosophie de la Relation. Poésie en étendue. (2009). It shows how opacity can be understood as a form of resistance both on an intersubjective level and on an ontological level. On an intersubjective level opacity is a resistance to being grasped as knowledge, and expressed as each and everyone’s right this becomes an ethics. On an ontological level opacity is a resistance to being assimilated into a dominant discourse, with Clevis Headleys words an ontological self-defense. The paper also explains how opacity is not an opposite to transparency but function in a more equal, integrated and complex relation to transparency. In a reading of Glissant as an advocate for an alternative concept of knowledge formulated as a poetics, opacity is also presented as enabling and supporting this alternative concept of knowledge. Thus the poetic become political constituted by opacity.