The Unique and the Exotic: Segalen, Levinas, Glissant

Both Emmanuel Levinas and Edouard Glissant explored the possibility of a form of relationality in which one opens oneself to the Other without being totally dissolved in the Other. But whereas Levinas located such a possibility in the ethical relation with the unique Other who disturbs my self-sufficiency, for Glissant it took place in what, particularly in his early work, he often identified as a primarily aesthetic relation with the exotic. In that early work Glissant drew heavily on Victor Segalen’s account of the shock of the exotic as he attempted to explore the loss of diversity and difference, but in his later work, under the name creolization, he shifted his primary focus increasingly to the encounter between cultures, albeit while still drawing on some of the terms he had developed through his engagement with Segalen. In addition to demonstrating some of the parallels between Levinas and Glissant’s efforts to investigate a largely neglected form of relationality, this paper also explores the efforts both Segalen and Glissant made to free the the term “exotic” from some of its problematic connotations.