In his Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant laments the enforced transparency of a French language “given in advance” and assumed to be fixed and absolute, and argues instead for dynamic and situated reconfigurations and diversions that, in francophone regions like the Antilles or Réunion, might “destabiliz[e] ‘standard’ French” and “provide the means for [a] place and its people to relate to the world as one among equivalent entities.” Hence, what is at stake is both the “renunciation of an arrogant, monolingual separateness” (the ethnocentric privileging of an original language and set of uses) and the willingness “to enter into the penetrable opacity of a world in which one exists, or agrees to exist, with and among others.” As Glissant writes elsewhere, one should “speak with the knowledge that there are other languages in the world.” Likewise, Timothy Morton describes opacity “not a[s] total nothing, but […] as a meaningfulness not for him.”
