Ellipses, of Derrida and Glissant

How to contain, to simultaneously host and hold (con-tinere) two thinkers––two irreducible figures of thought––with their two unexchangeable physical bodies? What will emerge out of it, and what will have already emerged out of it, by virtue of this sheer juxtaposition of the two, a parataxis itself initiated by a certain historical contingency, namely their contemporality or contemporariness, their having-found-themselves-together as mortal beings within discretely concrete time and space that is nevertheless structurally, experientially, and therefore differently shared, in which their paths overlay, intersect, reflect, emulate, traverse, subtend each other, sometimes confessedly so, yet more often unacknowledged: The “Long Twentieth Century,” the longue durée of colonialism, capitalism, and geopolitics; Algeria, Martinique, France, a concurrent Africa(n past) of which they were both dispossessed; an ever-globalizing earth, an unprecedentedly planetarized world? But, moreover, how do we think their contemporaneity––biographical, factual––when each of them is so remarkably a thinker of dis-continuity and dis-location, of anachrony and dis-placement, of the impossibility as well as undesirability of “identity,” of being self-identical?