Glissants poëtica van wederzijdse ondoorzichtigheid: Een kritiek op afgedwongen transparantie Glissant’s poetics of opacity: a critique of forced transparancy

This article explores Édouard Glissant’s poetics of opacity as a critical response to forms of enforced transparency. It highlights the inherent ambiguity of Glissant’s notion of opacity, which simultaneously critiques oppressive power structures that impose transparency and advocates for an ethical right to mutual opacity. The article contrasts Glissant’s poetics of reciprocal opacity with the dominant Western hermeneutics of enforced transparency, which is rooted in a desire for total understanding and control. This exposes how this hermeneutics perpetuates epistemic violence, particularly in colonial and racial contexts. The concept of opacity challenges the reduction of otherness to comprehensible terms and instead embraces opacity as a relational, creative principle that preserves irreducible difference, without understanding. In the article, this discussion is anchored in Glissant’s engagement with the French philosophy of difference and his dialogue with William Faulkner’s oeuvre, particularly Absalom, Absalom!, which exemplifies the poetics of opacity through its fragmented narrative and postponed revelations about racial trauma. Ultimately, the article argues that Glissant’s poetics offers a transformative framework that resists the illusion of full transparency, foregrounding complexity and the ethical acceptance of unknowability in texts, relationships, and histories.