Anarchism, the Shock from Elsewhere, Glissant and Levinas

The aim of this paper is to critically situate and engage Glissant and Levinas within the hermeneutical heterotopia of the anarchist imaginary. With this orchestrated confrontation between Glissant and Levinas, I look to engage the issue of otherness as an errant—and not simply “open”—question. Despite discernible resonances between Glissant and Levinas, I argue that there exists a salient divergence between their respective ways of thinking within the anarchist imaginary. This divergence can be spelled out in terms of a difference between ethnographic opacity and ethical otherness. The “right to opacity” (le droit à l’opacité) in Glissant is not synonymous with nor equivalent to the command of and responsibility for “another” (l’Autrui) in Levinas. With these considerations, I recast le droit à l’opacité as the “right to refuse” forms of interpellation and over-determined chains of signifiers. Le droit à l’opacité is ultimately a demand for multilingualism. In a similar vein, I propose to rethink the ethical command of another (l’Autrui), in its accusation and address, as provoking an interruption of forms of interpellation and chains of signifiers.